What is it about?
Estimating and understanding productivity is still a key task for researchers and practitioners. Many studies looked at the human factors behind developer productivity, but little is known about the role of cultural and geographical diversity in development communities. Earlier studies 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. We built a statistical model with product and socio-technical factors and related it to productivity, measured as the number of commits in a given time. We applied the model to data from 25 open-source communities on GitHub.
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Why is it important?
Our results indicate that cultural and geographical dispersion have an impact on productivity. Managers and practitioners should consider these aspects in all phases of the software development lifecycle.
Perspectives
Productivity studies usually focus on technical or individual factors. In this paper, we measured how diverse a community is in terms of culture and location, and related it to the productivity of 25 open-source communities on GitHub. The results suggest that cultural and geographical dispersion do affect productivity, and the study became the basis for our later journal paper in JSS.
Prof. Stefano Lambiase
Aalborg Universitet
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: “There and Back Again?” On the Influence of Software Community Dispersion Over Productivity, August 2022, Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE),
DOI: 10.1109/seaa56994.2022.00035.
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