In Search of Socio-Technical Congruence: A Large-Scale Longitudinal Study
| Autor: | Mitchell Joblin, Sven Apel, Wolfgang Mauerer, Carlos Paradis, Rick Kazman, Damian A. Tamburri |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2022 |
| Předmět: |
FOS: Computer and information sciences
Computer science media_common.quotation_subject Comparability 020207 software engineering 02 engineering and technology Data science Software quality Software metric Software Engineering (cs.SE) Computer Science - Software Engineering Empirical research Congruence (geometry) Software bug 0202 electrical engineering electronic engineering information engineering Quality (business) Software media_common Interpretability |
| Zdroj: | IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. 48:3159-3184 |
| ISSN: | 2326-3881 0098-5589 |
| Popis: | We report on a large-scale empirical study investigating the relevance of socio-technical congruence over key basic software quality metrics, namely, bugs and churn. In particular, we explore whether alignment or misalignment of social communication structures and technical dependencies in large software projects influences software quality. To this end, we have defined a quantitative and operational notion of socio-technical congruence, which we call socio-technical motif congruence (STMC). STMC is a measure of the degree to which developers working on the same file or on two related files, need to communicate. As socio-technical congruence is a complex and multi-faceted phenomenon, the interpretability of the results is one of our main concerns, so we have employed a careful mixed-methods statistical analysis. In particular, we provide analyses with similar techniques as employed by seminal work in the field to ensure comparability of our results with the existing body of work. The major result of our study, based on an analysis of 25 large open-source projects, is that STMC is not related to project quality measures -- software bugs and churn -- in any temporal scenario. That is, we find no statistical relationship between the alignment of developer tasks and developer communications on the one hand, and project outcomes on the other hand. We conclude that, wherefore congruence does matter as literature shows, then its measurable effect lies elsewhere. 29 pages, 21 figures. To appear in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
| Externí odkaz: |
|