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Developer socio-technical coordination and the power of crowds in open, agile software development environments

Coordination and collaboration are among the most significant challenges faced by large, distributed software teams, given their lack of informal communication, and their geographical, cultural and organizational boundaries. This talk describes our more recent empirical studies into diverse aspects of socio-technical coordination in large, commercial organizations such as IBM and Dell. We studied the communication, awareness, knowledge management and organizational structures of large software teams and untangled some of these factors’ relationships to software quality. Our research methodology involves mixed-method approaches using interviews, surveys, repository data analysis and statistical methods, in an attempt to uncover hidden patterns of collaboration and tap into difficult but invaluable resources such as project-related online communication. Our results demonstrate the true power of crowds in large, agile projects, as well as the research potential brought about by the newer modes of collaboration in such open development environments.