Publicly accessible bug report repositories maintained by free / open source development communities provide vast stores of data about distributed software problem management (SWPM). Qualitative analysis of individual bug reports, texts that record community responses to reported software problems, shows how this distributed community uses its SWPM process to manage software quality. We focus on the role of one basic social process, negotiation, in SWPM. We report on the varieties and frequencies of negotiation practices and demonstrate how instances of negotiation in different contexts affect the organization of information, the allocation of community resources, and the disposition of software problems.

Large-scale software development requires coordination within and between very large engineering teams which may be located in different buildings, on different company campuses, and in different time zones. From a survey answered by 775 Microsoft software engineers, we learned how work was coordinated within and between teams and how engineers felt about their success at these tasks. The respondents revealed that the most common objects of coordination are schedules and features, not code or interfaces, and that more communication and personal contact worked better to make interactions between teams go more smoothly. 1.

Large-scale software development requires coordination within and between very large engineering teams which may be located in different buildings, on different company campuses, and in different time zones. At Microsoft Corporation, we studied a 3-year-old, 300-person software application team based in Redmond, WA to learn how they coordinate with three intra-organization, physically distributed dependencies: a platform library team also in Redmond; a team three time zones away in Boston, MA; and a team in Hyderabad, India. Thirty-one interviews with 26 team members revealed that coordination was most impacted by issues of communication, capacity and cooperation. Distributed teams faced additional challenges due to time zone and cultural differences between the team members. We support our findings with a survey of 775 engineers across Microsoft who described their experiences managing coordination in their own software products. We suggest new processes and tools to improve team coordination. 1

Abstract. The development of large and complex systems, under hard time constraints, requires the participation of many developers working concurrently. SCM systems allow concurrent access to software artifacts, but provide poor support to maintain data consistency when concurrent changes are performed on the same artifacts. This problem can be reduced if developers are aware of the others work and warned about the conflicts that may arise, allowing the users to manage the risks more effectively. Awareness, without any knowledge about the cooperative process and system models cannot help much, and indeed is not very much used today. We claim that awareness takes its potential only when it takes into account the cooperative process, and the system model in use. This paper, based on the experience gained with our tool Celine, explores the relationships between awareness, process and system models, and shows how the knowledge of these models can be used to improve the relevance of an awareness system. 1.

During collaborative development, individual developers can create conflicts in their copies of the code. Such conflicting edits are frequent in practice, and resolving them can be costly. We present Crystal, a tool that proactively examines developers ’ code and precisely identifies and reports on textual, compilation, and behavioral conflicts. When conflicts are present, Crystal enables developers to resolve them more quickly, and therefore at a lesser cost. When conflicts are absent, Crystal increases the developers ’ confidence that it is safe to merge their code. Crystal uses an unobtrusive interface to deliver pertinent information about conflicts. It informs developers about actions that would address the conflicts and about people with whom they should communicate.

We are interested in investigating a means to support distributed collaborations by raising awareness of interdependencies. Interdependencies can exist amongst organizational units, the team, the individuals, and the product both across sites and within a single site. We propose integrating a series of tools that we have developed based on the principles of the Continuous Coordination (CC) paradigm. We suggest that integrating these tools will increase distributed stakeholders ’ awareness and assist them in their sense-making and mindfulness processes. It can also lead to a better understanding of interdependencies and the impact of awareness on the distributed development process. Author Keywords Distributed development, coordination, awareness, mindfulness, sense-making, virtual organization.

It is often assumed that developers ’ view of their system and its environment is always consistent with everyone else’s; in practice, this assumption can be false, as the developer has little practical control over changes to the environments in which their code will be deployed. To proactively respond to such situations, developers must constantly monitor a flood of information involving changes to the deployment environments; unfortunately, the vast majority of this information is irrelevant to the individual developer, and its sheer volume makes it likely that infrequent change events of relevance are overlooked. As a result, errors may arise at deployment time that the developer does not immediately detect. This paper presents a recommendation approach for filtering the flood of change events on deployment dependencies to those that are most likely to cause problems for the individual developer. The approach is evaluated for its ability to drastically filter irrelevant details, while being unlikely to filter important ones. The relevance of the results is assessed on the basis of deployment problems that would have historically occurred within a set of industrial systems. Categories and Subject Descriptors

Development teams who work with others need to be aware of what everyone is doing in order to manage the risk of taking on dependencies. Using newsfeeds of software development activities mined from software repositories, teams can find relevant information to help them make well-informed decisions that affect the success of their endeavors. In this paper, we describe the architecture of a newsfeed system that we are currently building on top of the Codebook software repository mining platform. We discuss the design, construction and aggregation of newsfeeds, and include other important aspects such as summarization, filtering, context, and privacy. Categories and Subject Descriptors:

veloper decided to share that code with other developers. Overall, our approach provides precise and pertinent information available as soon as conflicts occur in the VCS. Figure 1: A screenshot of the Crystal tool as run by a developer named George. The green arrow informs George that his changes can be published (uploaded) without conflict to the master repository. The red merge symbol indicates that Ringo’s changes, if combined with George’s, would cause a test (“T”) failure. and without the use of a Crystal-like tool. Section 3 presents VCS terminology. Section 4 details our retrospective analysis of the frequency and persistence of conflicts in practice. Section 5 describes the information that can help developers better manage their conflicts. Section 6 introduces the design of Crystal, an unobtrusive tool that computes and reports this information to developers. Section 7 surveys related work. Section 8 discusses threats to validity. Finally, Section 9 summarizes our results and contributions.

Collaboration in software development is a complex issue that has been examined by various researchers over the last decade. This paper presents a systematic literature review of pertinent literature on empirical studies on collaborative software development. We found that a lot of progress has been achieved in the field of global or distributed development. While there are still many challenges, today’s projects seem to have overcome at least some of those. Also, first steps have been made in understanding the collaborative aspects of requirements engineering and design. Research on tools for collaboration is advanced, having resulted in several successful tools especially in the area of communication. 1.