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Evolutionary trends of developer coordination: a network approach

  • Software evolution is a fundamental process that transcends the realm of technical artifacts and permeates the entire organizational structure of a software project. By means of a longitudinal empirical study of 18 large open-source projects, we examine and discuss the evolutionary principles that govern the coordination of developers. By applying a network-analytic approach, we found that the implicit and self-organizing structure of developer coordination is ubiquitously described by non-random organizational principles that defy conventional software-engineering wisdom. In particular, we found that: (a) developers form scale-free networks, in which the majority of coordination requirements arise among an extremely small number of developers, (b) developers tend to accumulate coordination requirements with more and more developers over time, presumably limited by an upper bound, and (c) initially developers are hierarchically arranged, but over time, form a hybrid structure, in which core developers are hierarchically arranged and peripheral developers are not. Our results suggest that the organizational structure of large projects is constrained to evolve towards a state that balances the costs and benefits of developer coordination, and the mechanisms used to achieve this state depend on the project’s scale.

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Metadaten
Author:Mitchell Joblin, Sven Apel, Wolfgang MauererORCiDGND
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-016-9478-9
Parent Title (English):Empirical Software Engineering
Publisher:Springer
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Year of first Publication:2016
Release Date:2022/05/10
Tag:Developer coordination; Developer networks; Software evolution
Volume:22
Issue:4
First Page:2050
Last Page:2094
Institutes:Fakultät Informatik und Mathematik
Fakultät Informatik und Mathematik / Labor für Digitalisierung (LFD)
Begutachtungsstatus:peer-reviewed
research focus:Digitalisierung
Licence (German):Keine Lizenz - Es gilt das deutsche Urheberrecht: § 53 UrhG