The mythical man-month (anniversary ed.)
The mythical man-month (anniversary ed.)
Putting Risk Management into Practice
IEEE Software
Network Analysis: Methodological Foundations (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)
Network Analysis: Methodological Foundations (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)
Empirical Software Engineering
Can developer-module networks predict failures?
Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of software engineering
Predicting failures with developer networks and social network analysis
Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of software engineering
Latent social structure in open source projects
Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of software engineering
Predicting build failures using social network analysis on developer communication
ICSE '09 Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering
Tesseract: Interactive visual exploration of socio-technical relationships in software development
ICSE '09 Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering
Secure open source collaboration: an empirical study of linus' law
Proceedings of the 16th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
Codebook: discovering and exploiting relationships in software repositories
Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 1
Awareness 2.0: staying aware of projects, developers and tasks using dashboards and feeds
Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 1
Strengthening the empirical analysis of the relationship between Linus' Law and software security
Proceedings of the 2010 ACM-IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
Socio-technical developer networks: should we trust our measurements?
Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Software Engineering
Evolution of developer social network and its impact on bug fixing process
Proceedings of the 6th India Software Engineering Conference
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With each new developer to a software development team comes a greater challenge to manage the communication, coordination, and knowledge transfer amongst teammates. Fred Brooks discusses this challenge in The Mythical Man-Month by arguing that rapid team expansion can lead to a complex team organization structure. While Brooks focuses on productivity loss as the negative outcome, poor product quality is also a substantial concern. But if team expansion is unavoidable, can any quality impacts be mitigated? Our objective is to guide software engineering managers by empirically analyzing the effects of team size, expansion, and structure on product quality. We performed an empirical, longitudinal case study of a large Cisco networking product over a five year history. Over that time, the team underwent periods of no expansion, steady expansion, and accelerated expansion. Using team-level metrics, we quantified characteristics of team expansion, including team size, expansion rate, expansion acceleration, and modularity with respect to department designations. We examined statistical correlations between our monthly team-level metrics and monthly product-level metrics. Our results indicate that increased team size and linear growth are correlated with later periods of better product quality. However, periods of accelerated team expansion are correlated with later periods of reduced software quality. Furthermore, our linear regression prediction model based on team metrics was able to predict the product's post-release failure rate within a 95% prediction interval for 38 out of 40 months. Our analysis provides insight for project managers into how the expansion of development teams can impact product quality.