Research Track Session

Crowdsourcing is an emerging and promising approach which involves delegating a variety of tasks to an unknown workforce - the crowd. Crowdsourcing has been applied quite successfully in various contexts from basic tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk to solving complex industry problems, e.g. InnoCentive. Companies are increasingly using crowdsourcing to accomplish specific software development tasks. However, very little research exists on this specific topic. This paper presents an in-depth industry case study of crowdsourcing software development at a multinational corporation. Our case study highlights a number of challenges that arise when crowdsourcing software development. For example, the crowdsourcing development process is essentially a waterfall model and this must eventually be integrated with the agile approach used by the company. Crowdsourcing works better for specific software development tasks that are less complex and stand-alone without interdependencies. The development cost was much greater than originally expected, overhead in terms of company effort to prepare specifications and answer crowdsourcing community queries was much greater, and the time-scale to complete contests, review submissions and resolve quality issues was significant. Finally, quality issues were pushed later in the lifecycle given the lengthy process necessary to identify and resolve quality issues. Given the emphasis in software engineering on identifying bugs as early as possible, this is quite problematic.

Distributed software development allows firms to leverage cost advantages and place work near centers of competency. This distribution comes at a cost -- distributed teams face challenges from differing cultures, skill levels, and a lack of shared working hours. In this paper we examine whether and how geographic and temporal separation in a large scale distributed software development influences developer interactions. We mine the work item trackers for a large commercial software project with a globally distributed development team. We examine both the time to respond and the propensity of individuals to respond and find that when taken together, geographic distance has little effect, while temporal separation has a significant negative impact on the time to respond. However, both have little impact on the social network of individuals in the organization. These results suggest that while temporally distributed teams do communicate, it is at a slower rate, and firms may wish to locate partner teams in similar time zones for maximal performance.

The microblogging service Twitter has over 500 million users posting over 500 million tweets daily. Research has established that software developers use Twitter in their work, but this has not yet been examined in detail. Twitter is an important medium in some software engineering circles—understanding its use could lead to improved support, and learning more about the reasons for non-adoption could inform the design of improved tools. In a qualitative study, we surveyed 271 and interviewed 27 developers active on GitHub. We find that Twitter helps them keep up with the fast-paced development landscape. They use it to stay aware of industry changes, for learning, and for building relationships. We discover the challenges they experience and extract their coping strategies. Some developers do not want to or cannot embrace Twitter for their work—we show their reasons and alternative channels. We validate our findings in a follow-up survey with more than 1,200 respondents.

In distributed software development synchronized actions are important for completion of complex, interleaved tasks that require the abilities of multiple people. Synchronous development is manifested when file commits by two developers are close together in time and modify the same files. Here we propose quantitative methods for identifying synchronized activities in OSS projects, and use them to relate developer synchronization with effective productivity and communication. In particular, we define co-commit bursts and communication bursts, as intervals of time rich in co-commit and correspondence activities, respectively, and construct from them smoothed time series which can be, subsequently, correlated to discover synchrony. We find that synchronized co-commits between developers are associated with their effective productivity and coordination: during co-commit bursts, vs. at other times, the project size grows faster even though the overall coding effort slows down. We also find strong correlation between synchronized co-commits and communication, that is, for pairs of developers, more co-commit bursts are accompanied with more communication bursts, and their relationship follows closely a linear model. In addition, synchronized co-commits and communication activities occur very close together in time, thus, they can also be thought of as synchronizing each other. This study can help with better understanding collaborative mechanisms in OSS and the role communication plays in distributed software engineering.