Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

10-2012

Abstract

IBM's Jazz initiative offers a state-of-the-art collaborative development environment (CDE) facilitating developer interactions around interdependent units of work. In this paper, we analyze development data across two versions of a major IBM product developed on the Jazz platform, covering in total 19 months of development activity, including 17,000+ work items and 61,000+ comments made by more than 190 developers in 35 locations. By examining the relation between developer talk and work, we find evidence that developers maintain a reasonably high level of connectivity with peer developers with whom they share work dependencies, but the span of a developer's communication goes much beyond the known dependencies of his/her work items. Using multiple linear regression models, we find that the number of defects owned by a developer is impacted by the number of other developers (s)he is connected through talk, his/her interpersonal influence in the network of work dependencies, the number of work items (s)he comments on, and the number work items (s)he owns. These effects are maintained even after controlling for workload, role, work dependency, and connection related factors. We discuss the implications of our results for collaborative software development and project governance.

Keywords

Collaboration, Defects, Jazz, Models, Social network analysis, Software teams

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems | Organizational Communication | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Information Systems and Management

Publication

OOPSLA 2012: Proceedings of the 27th Annual ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications, Tucson, AZ, October 19-26

Volume

47

Issue

10

First Page

655

Last Page

667

ISBN

9781450315616

Identifier

10.1145/2398857.2384664

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

New York

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/2398857.2384664

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