A social network based study of software team dynamics

• Main Authors: DATTA, Subhajit, KAULGOUD, Vikrant S., SHARMA, Vibhu Saujanya, KUMAR, Nishant
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2010
• Subjects: Bugs; Centrality; Social networks; Software teams; Databases and Information Systems; Organizational Communication; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/5572; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/6575/viewcontent/Social_network_based_study_of_software_team_dynamics_pv.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Members of software project teams have specific roles and responsibilities which are formally defined during project inception or at the start of a life cycle activity. Often, the team structure undergoes spontaneous changes as delivery deadlines draw near and critical tasks have to be completed. Some members -- depending on their skill or seniority -- need to take on more responsibilities, while others end up being peripheral to the project's execution. We posit that this kind of ad hoc reorganization of a team's structure can be discerned from the project's bug tracker. In this paper, we extract a social network from the bug log of a real life software system and apply ideas from social network analysis to understand how the positions of individual team members in the network relate to their organizational seniority, project roles, and geographic locations that define the formal team structure. In addition to providing insights on individual team members for the system studied, our approach can serve as a framework for analyzing team dynamics of software projects.