Proceedings of the the 7th joint meeting of the European software engineering conference and the ACM SIGSOFT symposium on The foundations of software engineering
Sources of errors in distributed development projects: implications for collaborative tools
Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
Firms as Incubators of Open-Source Software
Information Systems Research
Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering
Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering
Ownership, experience and defects: a fine-grained study of authorship
Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Don't touch my code!: examining the effects of ownership on software quality
Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGSOFT symposium and the 13th European conference on Foundations of software engineering
Information Systems Research
Organizational Learning: From Experience to Knowledge
Organization Science
A Hidden Markov Model of Developer Learning Dynamics in Open Source Software Projects
Information Systems Research
Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
The impact of communication structure on new product development outcomes
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Talk versus work: characteristics of developer collaboration on the jazz platform
Proceedings of the ACM international conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Journal of Global Information Management
Distributed development considered harmful?
Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering
The communication patterns of technical leaders: impact on product development team performance
Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing
Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal
Network ties and the success of open source software development
The Journal of Strategic Information Systems
A tool supporting root cause analysis for synchronous retrospectives in distributed software teams
Information and Software Technology
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This study examines whether individuals, groups, and organizational units learn from experience in software development and whether this learning improves productivity. Although prior research has found the existence of learning curves in manufacturing and service industries, it is not clear whether learning curves also apply to knowledge work like software development. We evaluate the relative productivity impacts from accumulating specialized experience in a system, diversified experience in related and unrelated systems, and experience from working with others on modification requests (MRs) in a telecommunications firm, which uses an incremental software development methodology. Using multilevel modeling, we analyze extensive data archives covering more than 14 years of systems development work on a major telecommunications product dating from the beginning of its development process. Our findings reveal that the relative importance of the different types of experience differs across levels of analysis. Specialized experience has the greatest impact on productivity for MRs completed by individual developers, whereas diverse experience in related systems plays a larger role in improving productivity for MRs and system releases completed by groups and organizational units. Diverse experience in unrelated systems has the least influence on productivity at all three levels of analysis. Our findings support the existence of learning curves in software development and provide insights into when specialized or diverse experience may be more valuable.