Seeking the Source

Authors

• Cleidson de Souza
• Jon Froehlich
• Paul Dourish

Short Description

In distributed software development, the structure of the software system itself can create dependencies between software elements, while the structure of the development process can create dependencies between software developers. The paper uncovers the structures of software projects and the ways in which development processes are inscribed into software artifacts. With open source communities as an example, a range of organizational processes and arrangements are uncovered in software repositories.

Important Citation

Software development, then, is a particularly fruitful domain in which to study the relationship between technological artifacts and the social structures that shape them.

[De Souza et al., 2005]

Evaluation

In our informal evaluations, developers involved in distributed software development projects relied upon both the activity information and the structure information in coordination to develop a holistic view of software development activity.

[De Souza et al., 2005]

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