• search hit 84 of 84
Back to Result List

In Search of Socio-Technical Congruence: A Large-Scale Longitudinal Study

  • This paper describes a large-scale empirical study investigating the relevance of socio-technical congruence over key basic software quality metrics, namely, bugs and churn. That is, we explore whether alignment or misalignment of social communication structures and technical dependencies in large software projects influences software quality. To this end, we have defined a quantitative and operational notion of socio-technical congruence, which we call /socio-technical motif congruence/ (STMC). STMC is a measure of the degree to which developers working on the same file or on two related files, need to communicate. As socio-technical congruence is a complex and multi-faceted phenomenon, the interpretability of the results is one of our main concerns, so we have employed a careful mixed-methods statistical analysis. In particular, we provide analyses with similar techniques as employed by seminal work in the field to ensure comparability of our results with the existing body of work. The major result of our study, based on an analysis of 25 large open-source projects, is that STMC is /not/ related to project quality measures---software bugs and churn---in any temporal scenario. That is, we find no statistical relationship between the alignment of developer tasks and developer communications on one hand, and project outcomes on the other hand. We conclude that, wherefore congruence does matter as literature shows, then its measurable effect lies elsewhere.

Export metadata

Additional Services

Share in Twitter Search Google Scholar Statistics
Metadaten
Author:Wolfgang MauererORCiDGND, Mitchell Joblin, Damian Tamburri, Carlos Paradis, Rick Kazman, Sven Apel
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2021.3082074
Parent Title (English):IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE)
Publisher:IEEE
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Year of first Publication:2022
Release Date:2022/01/14
Tag:Empirical Software Engineering; Graph Analysis; Human Factors in Software Engineering;; Mixed-Methods Research; Quantitative Software Engineering; Socio-Technical Analysis; Socio-Technical Congruence
Volume:48
Issue:8
Pagenumber:29
First Page:3159
Last Page:3184
Note:
Corresponding author: Wolfgang Mauerer
Institutes:Fakultät Informatik und Mathematik
Fakultät Informatik und Mathematik / Labor für Digitalisierung (LFD)
Begutachtungsstatus:peer-reviewed
research focus:Digitalisierung
OpenAccess Publikationsweg:Hybrid Open Access - OA-Veröffentlichung in einer Subskriptionszeitschrift/-medium
Corresponding author der OTH Regensburg
Licence (German):Creative Commons - CC BY - Namensnennung 4.0 International