Does Distributed Development Affect Software Quality? An Empirical Case Study of Windows Vista.
Existing literature on distributed development in software engineering, and other fields discusses various challenges, including cultural barriers, expertise transfer difficulties, and communication and coordination overhead. Conventional wisdom, in fact, holds that distributed software development...
| Publicado en: | Communications of the ACM Vol. 52; no. 8; pp. 85 - 94 |
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| Autores principales: | , , , , |
| Formato: | Artículo |
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Association for Computing Machinery
Aug2009
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=43479967&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 43479967 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00010782 ACM jtl: Communications of the ACM issn: 00010782 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Aug2009 vid: 52 iid: 8 pid: 68 pub: Association for Computing Machinery artinfo: ui: 43479967 10.1145/1536616.1536639 ppf: 85 ppct: 9 formats: tig: atl: Does Distributed Development Affect Software Quality? An Empirical Case Study of Windows Vista. aug: au: Bird, Christian Nagappan, Nachiappan Devanbu, Premkumar Gall, Harald Murphy, Brendan affil: University of California, Davis, Davis, CA. University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland. su: Computer software development Computer software quality control Software engineering management Microsoft software Software productivity Software measurement sug: subj: Computer software development Computer software quality control Software engineering management Microsoft software Software productivity Software measurement ab: Existing literature on distributed development in software engineering, and other fields discusses various challenges, including cultural barriers, expertise transfer difficulties, and communication and coordination overhead. Conventional wisdom, in fact, holds that distributed software development is riskier and more challenging than collocated development. We revisit this belief, empirically studying the overall development of Windows Vista and comparing the post-release failures of components that were developed in a distributed fashion with those that were developed by collocated teams. We found a negligible difference in failures. This difference becomes even less significant when controlling for the number of developers working on a binary. Furthermore, we also found that component characteristics (such as code churn, complexity, dependency information, and test code coverage) differ very little between distributed and collocated components. Finally, we examine the software process used during the Vista development cycle and examine how it may have mitigated some of the difficulties of distributed development introduced in prior work in this area. pubtype: Periodical doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y dt: @attributes: year: 2009 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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