Coping with distance: An empirical study of communication on the Jazz platform

Global software development - which is characterized by teams separated by physical distance and/or time-zone differences - has traditionally posed significant communication challenges. Often these have caused delays in completing tasks, or created misalignment across sites leading to re-work. In recent years, however, a new breed of development environments with rich collaboration features have emerged to facilitate cross-site work in distributed projects. In this paper we revisit the question "does distance matter?" in the context of IBM Jazz Platform - a state-of-the-art collaborative development environment. We study the ecosystem of a large distributed team of around 300 members across 35 physical locations, which uses the Jazz platform for agile development. Our results indicate that while there is a delay in communication due to geographic separation, teams try to reduce the impact of delays by having a large percentage of work distributed within same/few time zones and working beyond regular office hours to interact with distributed teams. We observe different communication patterns depending on the roles of the team members, with component leads and project managers having a significantly higher overhead than development team members. We discuss the practical implications of our findings in terms of some best practices that can help lessen the impact of distance.</p

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

An Alternate Idea for Storage Optimization in Search Engine

We propose an alternate indexing storage technique of Search Engine. In this approach, we achieve reduced space complexity. We try to decrease time complexity for faster data retrieval and decrease storage space for efficient utilization of space. This paper provides an algorithm of indexing mechanism by which effective storage space is reduced. Space complexity of a Search Engine depends on the indices created by the indexing algorithm. Hamming distance concept is used to achieve better result