A study on the geographical distribution of Brazil’s prestigious software developers

• Main Authors: FIGUEIRA FILHO, Fernando, PERIN, Marcelo Gattermann, TREUDE, Christoph, MARCZAK, Sabrina, MELO, Leandro de Almeida, MARQUES DA SILVA, Igor, BIBIANO DOS SANTOS, Lucas
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2015
• Subjects: Collaborative software development; software engineering; social network analysis; Brazil; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/8842; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/9845/viewcontent/jisa15.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Brazil is an emerging economy with many IT initiatives from public and private sectors. To evaluate the progress of such initiatives, we study the geographical distribution of software developers in Brazil, in particular which of the Brazilian states succeed the most in attracting and nurturing them. We compare the prestige of developers with socio-economic data and find that (i) prestigious developers tend to be located in the most economically developed regions of Brazil, (ii) they are likely to follow others in the same state they are located in, (iii) they are likely to follow other prestigious developers, and (iv) they tend to follow more people. We discuss the implications of those findings for the development of the Brazilian software industry.