What is it about?
Understanding what makes software developers productive matters for both researchers and companies. Many studies looked at human factors, but few considered the cultural and geographical diversity of development communities, and most treated culture as an abstract concept without measuring it. In this paper, we measured how diverse a community is in terms of cultural attitudes and of where its members are located, and we studied how this relates to productivity. We built a statistical model using data from 25 open-source communities on GitHub, and then checked the results with a survey of 140 practitioners.
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Why is it important?
Our results show that cultural and geographical dispersion can have a considerable impact on productivity. Project managers can use this knowledge to build more productive teams, and tool vendors can use it to design analytics tools that estimate productivity better. We encourage managers and practitioners to consider these aspects in every phase of the software lifecycle.
Perspectives
This journal paper builds on our SEAA 2022 study “There and Back Again?”. Besides the statistical model on 25 open-source communities on GitHub, we added a survey with 140 practitioners to check our results with people who work in the field. The main message did not change: cultural and geographical dispersion can affect productivity, so managers should consider them in every phase of a project.
Prof. Stefano Lambiase
Aalborg Universitet
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: An Empirical Investigation Into the Influence of Software Communities’ Cultural and Geographical Dispersion on Productivity, Journal of Systems and Software, February 2024, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.jss.2023.111878.
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