Seeking the source: software source code as a social and technical artifact

  • Authors:

  • Cleidson de Souza;Jon Froehlich;Paul Dourish

  • Affiliations:

  • Universidade Federal do Pará Belém, PA, Brazil and University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA;University of Washington Seattle, WA;University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA

  • Venue:
  • GROUP '05 Proceedings of the 2005 international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

In distributed software development, two sorts of dependencies can arise. The structure of the software system itself can create dependencies between software elements, while the structure of the development process can create dependencies between software developers. Each of these both shapes and reflects the development process. Our research concerns the extent to which, by looking uniformly at artifacts and activities, we can uncover the structures of software projects, and the ways in which development processes are inscribed into software artifacts. We show how a range of organizational processes and arrangements can be uncovered in software repositories, with implications for collaborative work in large distributed groups such as open source communities.