47 research outputs found
Evolution of developer collaboration on the Jazz platform: A study of a large scale agile project
Collaboration is a key aspect of the agile philosophy of software development. As a software system matures over iterations, trends of developer collaboration can offer valuable insights into project dynamics. In this paper, we study evolution of developer collaboration for a large scale agile project on the Jazz platform. We construct networks of collaboration based on developer affiliations across comments on work items and file changes; and then compare parameters of such networks with established results from networks of scientific collaborations. The comparisons illuminate interesting facets of developer collaboration on the Jazz platform. Such perception helps deeper understanding of the role of interaction in agile projects, as well as more effective project governance.</p
Goal-Oriented Next Best Activity Recommendation using Reinforcement Learning
Recommending a sequence of activities for an ongoing case requires that the
recommendations conform to the underlying business process and meet the
performance goal of either completion time or process outcome. Existing work on
next activity prediction can predict the future activity but cannot provide
guarantees of the prediction being conformant or meeting the goal. Hence, we
propose a goal-oriented next best activity recommendation. Our proposed
framework uses a deep learning model to predict the next best activity and an
estimated value of a goal given the activity. A reinforcement learning method
explores the sequence of activities based on the estimates likely to meet one
or more goals. We further address a real-world problem of multiple goals by
introducing an additional reward function to balance the outcome of a
recommended activity and satisfy the goal. We demonstrate the effectiveness of
the proposed method on four real-world datasets with different characteristics.
The results show that the recommendations from our proposed approach outperform
in goal satisfaction and conformance compared to the existing state-of-the-art
next best activity recommendation techniques
Talk versus work: Characteristics of developer collaboration on the Jazz platform
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.</p