The Co-Evolution of Trust and Coordination in Global Software Development Teams-An Extensible Evolutionary Game Theory Model

Trust is important for effective coordination in global software development teams. However, the co-evolution of trust and coordination is often neglected. To fill the gap, we develop an evolutionary game theory model. Using the Behavior-Preference-Constraint (BPC) model and Adaptive Play, the model challenges the traditional view of trust as a static “resource” for coordination and proposes an alternative view that trust dynamically restricts people’s action choices in interacting with other team members. Through analyzing the model, we describe how trust and coordination co-evolve in the progress of interactions among team members. We propose three propositions summarizing the long-term characteristics of coordination and trust in the process. For example, the co-existence of low trust and high trust can be a stable state in the long run, which explains why low trust can always exist even when all team members strictly prefer effective coordination

Towards An Empirical Theory of Ideologies in the Open Source Software Movement

Encompassing a diverse population of developers, non-technical users, organizations, and many other stakeholders, open source software (OSS) development has expanded to broader social movements from the initial product development aims. Ideology, as a coherent system of ideas, offers value commitments and normative implications for any social movement, so does OSS ideology for the open source movement. However, the literature on open source ideology is often fragile, or lacking in empirical evidence. In this paper, we sought to develop a comprehensive empirical theory of ideologies in open source software movement. Following a grounded theory procedure, we collected and analyzed data from 22 semi-structured interviews and 41 video recordings of Open Source Initiative (OSI) board members' public speeches. An empirical theory of OSS ideology emerged in our analysis, with six key categories: membership, norms/values, goals, activities, resources, and positions/group relations; each consists of a number of themes and subthemes. We discussed a subset of carefully selected themes and subthemes in detail based on their theoretical significance. With this ideological lens, we examined the implications and insights into open source development, and shed light on the research into open source as a social-cultural construction in the future

On The Roles of APIs in the Coordination of Collaborative Software Development

The principle of information hiding has been very influential in software engineering since its inception in 1972. This principle prescribes that software modules hide implementation details from other modules in order to reduce their dependencies. This separation also decreases the dependency among software developers implementing these modules, thus simplifying the required coordination. A common instantiation of this principle widely used in the industry is in the form of application programming interfaces (APIs). While previous studies report on the general use and benefits of APIs, they have glossed over the detailed ways in which APIs facilitate the coordination of work. In order to unveil these mechanisms, we performed a qualitative study on how practitioners use APIs in their daily work. Using ethnographic data from two different software development teams, we identified three roles played by APIs in the coordination of software development projects. These roles are described using three metaphors: APIs as contracts, APIs as boundaries, and APIs as communication mechanisms. As contracts, APIs allow software developers to work in parallel and independently. As a communication mechanism, APIs facilitate communication among software developers by giving them something specific to talk about. At the same time, APIs establish the boundaries between developers, and, accordingly, what should be talked about. This paper also reports on problems the studied teams face when using APIs to coordinate their work. Based on these results, we draw theoretical implications for collaborative software engineering

Toward Visualization and Analysis of Traceability Relationships in Distributed and Offshore Software Development Projects

Offshore software development projects provoke new issues to the collaborative endeavor of software development due to their global distribution and involvement of various people, processes, and tools. These problems relate to the geographical distance and the associated time-zone differences; cultural, organizational, and process issues; as well as language problems. However, existing tool support is neither adequate nor grounded in empirical observations. This paper presents two empirical studies of global software development teams and their usage of tools. The results are then used to motivate and inform the construction of more useful software development tools. The focus is on issues that are tool-related but have not yet been solved by existing tools. The two software tools presented as solutions, Ariadne and TraVis, explicitly address yet unresolved issues in global software development and also integrate with prevalent other solutions

Adapting Software Teams to the New Normal: An Early Case Study of Transitioning to Hybrid Work Under COVID-19

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many studies have begun to address what some refer to as the "new normal," comprising hybrid arrangements of employees working from home and working at the office with varying schedule arrangements. While many of the studies to date addressed how employees coped with work-from-home, we sought to investigate how employees dealt with a transition to the new normal of hybrid arrangements. To shed light on this topic, we conducted a survey-based case study at one office location of a large, multinational software corporation. The site sought to transition employees fully working from home to working two days remotely and three predefined days in their shared workspace. Our survey results indicated a substantial decline in work satisfaction since the beginning of this transition, which can be explained by diverse work preferences. Furthermore, some software developers felt frustrated during this transition time; they described challenges they underwent and proposed potential solutions. In this paper, we present our lessons learned in this case study and describe some actionable recommendations for practitioners facing such transitions

Unveiling Elite Developers' Activities in Open Source Projects

Open-source developers, particularly the elite developers, maintain a diverse portfolio of contributing activities. They do not only commit source code but also spend a significant amount of effort on other communicative, organizational, and supportive activities. However, almost all prior research focuses on a limited number of specific activities and fails to analyze elite developers' activities in a comprehensive way. To bridge this gap, we conduct an empirical study with fine-grained event data from 20 large open-source projects hosted on GitHub. Thus, we investigate elite developers' contributing activities and their impacts on project outcomes. Our analyses reveal three key findings: (1) they participate in a variety of activities while technical contributions (e.g., coding) accounting for a small proportion only; (2) they tend to put more effort into supportive and communicative activities and less effort into coding as the project grows; (3) their participation in non-technical activities is negatively associated with the project's outcomes in term of productivity and software quality. These results provide a panoramic view of elite developers' activities and can inform an individual's decision making about effort allocation, thus leading to finer project outcomes. The results also provide implications for supporting these elite developers