Skip to main content

Advertisement

SpringerLink
Log in

Examining ownership models in software teams

A systematic literature review and a replication study

  • Published:
Empirical Software Engineering Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Effective ownership of software artifacts, particularly code, is crucial for accountability, knowledge sharing, and code quality enhancement. Researchers have proposed models linking ownership of software artifacts with developer performance and code quality. Our study aims to systematically examine various ownership models and provide a structured literature overview. Conducting a systematic literature review, we identified 79 relevant papers published between 2005 and 2022. We developed a taxonomy of ownership artifacts based on type, owners, and degree of ownership, along with compiling modeling variables and analytics types used in each study. Additionally, we assessed the replication status of each study. As a result, we identified nine distinct software artifacts whose ownership has been discussed in the literature, with "Code" being the most frequently analyzed artifact. We found that only three papers (3.79%) provided code and data, whereas nine papers (11.4%) provided only data. Using our systematic literature review results, we replicated experiments on nine priority projects at Brightsquid. The company aimed to compare its code quality against ownership factors in other teams, so we conducted a replication study using their data. Unlike prior studies, we found no strong correlation between minor contributors and bug numbers. Surprisingly, we found no strong link between the total number of developers modifying a file and bug counts, contrasting previous findings. However, we observed a significant correlation between major contributors and bug counts, diverging from earlier research. This study provides a comprehensive overview of ownership models and lists the variables used for ownership modeling in software engineering. Additionally, the study’s findings can inform the development of best practices for software development teams and assist in decision-making, considering various company and project contexts.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10

Similar content being viewed by others

Explore related subjects

Discover the latest articles, news and stories from top researchers in related subjects.

Data Availibility Statement

The systematic literature review analysis presented in this paper is available as an appendix. However, the case study data used in this study is protected by non-disclosure agreements between York University and Brightsquid, and therefore cannot be made publicly available. The names of the commercial projects used in this study have been anonymized to maintain their confidentiality.

Notes

  1. https://Brightsquid.com/

  2. HIPAA: Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996

References

  • Al Alam SD, Nayebi M, Pfahl D, Ruhe G (2017) A two-staged survey on release readiness. In: Proceedings of the 21st international conference on evaluation and assessment in software engineering, pp 374–383

  • Amann S, Beyer S, Kevic K, Gall H (2015) Software mining studies: goals, approaches, artifacts, and replicability. Software Engineering: International Summer Schools, LASER 2013–2014. Elba, Italy, Revised Tutorial Lectures 10, pp 121–158

  • Anvik J, Murphy GC (2011) Reducing the effort of bug report triage: recommenders for development-oriented decisions. ACM Trans Softw Eng Methodol (TOSEM) 20(3):1–35

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Anvik J, Hiew L, Murphy GC (2006) Who should fix this bug? In: Proceedings of the 28th international conference on software engineering, pp 361–370

  • Bertram D, Voida A, Greenberg S, Walker R (2010) Communication, collaboration, and bugs: the social nature of issue tracking in small, collocated teams. In: Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on computer supported cooperative work, pp 291–300

  • Bhattacharya P, Neamtiu I (2011) Assessing programming language impact on development and maintenance: a study on c and c++. In: Proceedings of the 33rd international conference on software engineering, pp 171–180

  • Bird C, Nagappan N, Murphy B, Gall H, Devanbu P (2010) An analysis of the effect of code ownership on software quality across windows, eclipse, and firefox. Technical report, University of California

  • Bird C, Nagappan N, Murphy B, Gall H, Devanbu P (2011) Don’t touch my code! examining the effects of ownership on software quality. In: Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGSOFT symposium and the 13th European conference on Foundations of software engineering, pp 4–14

  • Bogomolov E, Kovalenko V, Rebryk Y, Bacchelli A, Bryksin T (2021) Authorship attribution of source code: a language-agnostic approach and applicability in software engineering. In: Proceedings of the 29th ACM joint meeting on European software engineering conference and symposium on the foundations of software engineering, pp 932–944

  • Briand L, Bianculli D, Nejati S, Pastore F, Sabetzadeh M (2017) The case for context-driven software engineering research: generalizability is overrated. IEEE Softw 34(5):72–75

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Brooks A, Daly J, Miller J, Roper M, Wood M (1996) Replication of experimental results in software engineering. International Software Engineering Research Network (ISERN) Technical Report ISERN-96-10, University of Strathclyde, 2

  • Burga R, Spraakman C, Balestreri C, Rezania D (2022) Examining the transition to agile practices with information technology projects: agile teams and their experience of accountability. Int J Project Manage 40(1):76–87

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Businge J, Kawuma S, Bainomugisha E, Khomh F, Nabaasa E (2017) Code authorship and fault-proneness of open-source android applications: an empirical study. In: Proceedings of the 13th international conference on predictive models and data analytics in software engineering, pp 33–42

  • Caglayan B, Bener A (2012) Issue ownership activity in two large software projects. ACM SIGSOFT Softw Eng Notes 37(6):1–7

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cameron N, Dietl W (2009) Comparing universes and existential ownership types. Citeseer

  • Chung TR, Sharma PN, Daniel SL (2015) The impact of person-organization fit and psychological ownership on turnover in open source software projects. In: AMCIS

  • Datta S (2014) Perspectives on task ownership in mobile operating system development (invited talk). In: Proceedings of the 2nd international workshop on software development lifecycle for mobile, pp 11–12

  • Drury-Grogan ML, Conboy K, Acton T (2017) Examining decision characteristics & challenges for agile software development. J Syst Softw 131:248–265

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dutra E, Diirr B, Santos G (2021) Human factors and their influence on software development teams-a tertiary study. In: Brazilian symposium on software engineering, pp 442–451

  • Fink L, Shao J, Lichtenstein Y, Haefliger S (2020) The ownership of digital infrastructure: exploring the deployment of software libraries in a digital innovation cluster. J Inf Technol 35(3):251–269

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Foucault M, Teyton C, Lo D, Blanc X, Falleri J-R (2015) On the usefulness of ownership metrics in open-source software projects. Inf Softw Technol 64:102–112

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Foucault M, Falleri J-R, Blanc X (2014) Code ownership in open-source software. In: Proceedings of the 18th international conference on evaluation and assessment in software engineering, pp 1–9

  • Gómez OS, Juristo N, Vegas S (2014) Understanding replication of experiments in software engineering: a classification. Inf Softw Technol 56(8):1033–1048

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Greiler M, Herzig K, Czerwonka J (2015) Code ownership and software quality: a replication study. In: 2015 IEEE/ACM 12th working conference on mining software repositories. IEEE, pp 2–12

  • Hadad GDS, Doorn JH, do Prado Leite JCS (2017) Requirements authorship: a family process pattern. In: 2017 IEEE 25th International requirements engineering conference workshops (REW). IEEE, pp 248–251

  • Hajari F, Malmir S, Mirsaeedi E, Rigby PC (2024) Factoring expertise, workload, and turnover into code review recommendation. IEEE Trans Softw Eng

  • Hattori L, Lanza M (2009) Mining the history of synchronous changes to refine code ownership. In: 2009 6th ieee international working conference on mining software repositories. IEEE, pp 141–150

  • Hemmati A, Carlson C, Nayebi M, Ruhe G, Saunders C (2017) Analysis of software service usage in healthcare communication services. In: 2017 IEEE International conference on software quality, reliability and security companion (QRS-C). IEEE, pp 565–566

  • Herzig K, Nagappan N (2014) The impact of test ownership and team structure on the reliability and effectiveness of quality test runs. In: Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE International symposium on empirical software engineering and measurement, pp 1–10

  • Huh J, Newman MW, Ackerman MS (2011) Supporting collaborative help for individualized use. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems, pp 3141–3150

  • Hur J, Koo D, Shin Y, Kang K (2016) Secure data deduplication with dynamic ownership management in cloud storage. IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng 28(11):3113–3125

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jansen S, Rijsemus W (2006) Reducing customers’ total cost of ownership within a software supply network. In 2006 22nd IEEE international conference on software maintenance. IEEE, pp 269–271

  • Ji J, Park S, Woo G, Cho H (2007) Understanding the evolution process of program source for investigating software authorship and plagiarism. In: 2007 2nd International conference on digital information management, vol 1. IEEE, pp 98–103

  • Judy KH, Krumins-Beens I (2008) Great scrums need great product owners: Unbounded collaboration and collective product ownership. In Proceedings of the 41st annual hawaii international conference on system sciences (HICSS 2008). IEEE, pp 462–462

  • Juristo N, Vegas S (2011) The role of non-exact replications in software engineering experiments. Empir Softw Eng 16(3):295–324

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Juristo N, Gómez OS (2012) Replication of software engineering experiments. Empirical Software Engineering and Verification: International Summer Schools, LASER 2008-2010, Elba Island, Italy, Revised Tutorial Lectures, pp 60–88

  • Kabeer SJ, Nayebi M, Ruhe G, Carlson C, Chew F (2017) Predicting the vector impact of change-an industrial case study at brightsquid. In: 2017 ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM). IEEE, pp 131–140

  • Kaisler S, Armour F, Espinosa JA (2014) Introduction to big data: challenges, opportunities, and realities minitrack. In: 2014 47th Hawaii international conference on system sciences. IEEE, pp 728–728

  • Kaur R, Singh S, Kumar H (2021) An intrinsic authorship verification technique for compromised account detection in social networks. Soft Comput 25(6):4345–4366

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Keele S et al (2007) Guidelines for performing systematic literature reviews in software engineering

  • Kerfoot E, McKeever S (2009) Deadlock freedom through object ownership

  • Kitchenham BA, Budgen D, Brereton P (2015) Evidence-based software engineering and systematic reviews, vol 4. CRC Press

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Koana UA, Chew F, Carlson C, Nayebi M (2023) Ownership in the hands of accountability at brightsquid: a case study and a developer survey. In: Proceedings of the 31st ACM joint european software engineering conference and symposium on the foundations of software engineering, pp 2008–2019

  • Maruping LM, Zhang X, Venkatesh V (2009) Role of collective ownership and coding standards in coordinating expertise in software project teams. Eur J Inf Syst 18(4):355–371

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McIntosh S, Adams B, Nguyen TH, Kamei Y, Hassan AE (2011) An empirical study of build maintenance effort. In: 2011 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). IEEE, pp 141–150

  • Meneely A, Rotella P, Williams L (2011) Does adding manpower also affect quality? an empirical, longitudinal analysis. In: Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGSOFT symposium and the 13th European conference on Foundations of software engineering, pp 81–90

  • Meng X, Miller BP, Williams WR, Bernat AR (2013) Mining software repositories for accurate authorship. In: 2013 IEEE international conference on software maintenance. IEEE, pp 250–259

  • Menzies T, Butcher A, Cok D, Marcus A, Layman L, Shull F, Turhan B, Zimmermann T (2012) Local versus global lessons for defect prediction and effort estimation. IEEE Trans Software Eng 39(6):822–834

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mirsaeedi E, Rigby PC (2020) Mitigating turnover with code review recommendation: balancing expertise, workload, and knowledge distribution. In: Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 42nd international conference on software engineering, pp 1183–1195

  • Mockus A (2009) Succession: measuring transfer of code and developer productivity. In: 2009 IEEE 31st International conference on software engineering. IEEE, pp 67–77

  • Müller C, Reina G, Ertl T (2015) In-situ visualisation of fractional code ownership over time. In: Proceedings of the 8th international symposium on visual information communication and interaction, pp 13–20

  • Murphy-Hill E, Jaspan C, Sadowski C, Shepherd D, Phillips M, Winter C, Knight A, Smith E, Jorde M (2019) What predicts software developers’ productivity? IEEE Trans Software Eng 47(3):582–594

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nagappan N, Murphy B, Basili V (2008) The influence of organizational structure on software quality. In: 2008 ACM/IEEE 30th International conference on software engineering. IEEE, pp 521–530

  • Narayanan M, Gaston J, Dozier G, Cothran L, Arms-Chavez C, Rossi M, King MC, Bryant K (2018) Adversarial authorship, sentiment analysis, and the authorweb zoo. In: 2018 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI). IEEE, pp 928–932

  • Nayebi M, Kabeer SJ, Ruhe G, Carlson C, Chew F (2017) Hybrid labels are the new measure! IEEE Softw 35(1):54–57

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nayebi M, Dicke L, Ittyipe R, Carlson C, Ruhe G (2019) Essmart way to manage customer requests. Empir Softw Eng 24:3755–3789

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nayebi M, Cai Y, Kazman R, Ruhe G, Feng Q, Carlson C, Chew F (2019) A longitudinal study of identifying and paying down architecture debt. In: 2019 IEEE/ACM 41st International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice (ICSE-SEIP). IEEE, pp 171–180

  • Negara S, Karmani RK, Agha G (2011) Inferring ownership transfer for efficient message passing. ACM SIGPLAN Notices 46(8):81–90

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nickerson RC, Varshney U, Muntermann J (2013) A method for taxonomy development and its application in information systems. Eur J Inf Syst 22(3):336–359

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nordberg ME (2003) Managing code ownership. IEEE software 20(2):26–33

    Google Scholar 

  • Perez-Riverol Y, Gatto L, Wang R, Sachsenberg T, Uszkoreit J, da Veiga Leprevost F, Fufezan C, Ternent T, Eglen SJ, Katz DS et al (2016) Ten simple rules for taking advantage of git and github

  • Rahman F, Devanbu P (2011) Ownership, experience and defects: a fine-grained study of authorship. In: Proceedings of the 33rd international conference on software engineering, pp 491–500

  • Ralph P, Tempero E (2018) Construct validity in software engineering research and software metrics. In: Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on evaluation and assessment in software engineering 2018, pp 13–23

  • Ravitch T, Liblit B (2013) Analyzing memory ownership patterns in c libraries. In: Proceedings of the 2013 international symposium on memory management, pp 97–108

  • Rayside D, Mendel L (2007) Object ownership profiling: a technique for finding and fixing memory leaks. In: Proceedings of the twenty-second IEEE/ACM international conference on Automated software engineering, pp 194–203

  • Sedano T, Ralph P, Péraire C (2016) Practice and perception of team code ownership. In: Proceedings of the 20th international conference on evaluation and assessment in software engineering, pp 1–6

  • Shastri Y, Hoda R, Amor R (2021) The role of the project manager in agile software development projects. J Syst Softw 173:110871

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shastri Y, Hoda R, Amor R (2017) Understanding the roles of the manager in agile project management. In: Proceedings of the 10th innovations in software engineering conference, pp 45–55

  • Shridhar M, Adams B, Khomh F (2014) A qualitative analysis of software build system changes and build ownership styles. In: Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE international symposium on empirical software engineering and measurement, pp 1–10

  • Stevenson A (ed) (2010) Oxford Dictionary of English. Oxford University Press, USA

    Google Scholar 

  • Taivalsaari A, Mikkonen T, Systä K (2014) Liquid software manifesto: the era of multiple device ownership and its implications for software architecture. In: 2014 IEEE 38th Annual computer software and applications conference. IEEE, pp 338–343

  • Tessem B (2014) Individual empowerment of agile and non-agile software developers in small teams. Inf Softw Technol 56(8):873–889

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Thongtanunam P, McIntosh S, Hassan AE, Iida H (2016) Revisiting code ownership and its relationship with software quality in the scope of modern code review. In: Proceedings of the 38th international conference on software engineering, pp 1039–1050

  • Wendler R (2012) The maturity of maturity model research: a systematic mapping study. Inf Softw Technol 54(12):1317–1339

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wohlin C, Runeson P, Höst M, Ohlsson MC, Regnell B, Wesslén A (2012) Experimentation in software engineering. Springer Science & Business Media

  • Yang H (2016) Total cost of ownership for application replatform by open-source sw. Procedia Comput Sci 91:677–682

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zhao C, Song W, Liu X, Liu L, Zhao X (2018) Research on authorship attribution of article fragments via rnns. In: 2018 IEEE 9th International Conference on Software Engineering and Service Science (ICSESS). IEEE, pp 156–159

  • Zhu W, Godfrey MW (2021) Mea culpa: how developers fix their own simple bugs differently from other developers. In: 2021 IEEE/ACM 18th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR). IEEE, pp 515–519

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. York University, Toronto, Canada

    Umme Ayman Koana, Quang Hy Le, Shaikur Raman & Maleknaz Nayebi

  2. Brightsquid, Calgary, Canada

    Chris Carlson & Francis Chew

Authors
  1. Umme Ayman Koana
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Quang Hy Le
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Shaikur Raman
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Chris Carlson
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Francis Chew
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Maleknaz Nayebi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Maleknaz Nayebi.

Ethics declarations

Conflicts of interest

The authors declared that they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Communicated by: Slinger Jansen.

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Koana, U.A., Le, Q.H., Raman, S. et al. Examining ownership models in software teams. Empir Software Eng 29, 155 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-024-10538-5

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-024-10538-5

Keywords

Search

Navigation