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Role of collective ownership and coding standards in coordinating expertise in software project teams

  • Original Article
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European Journal of Information Systems

Abstract

Software development is a complex undertaking that continues to present software project teams with numerous challenges. Software project teams are adopting extreme programming (XP) practices in order to overcome the challenges of software development in an increasingly dynamic environment. The ability to coordinate software developers' efforts is critical in such conditions. Expertise coordination has been identified as an important emergent process through which software project teams manage non-routine challenges in software development. However, the extent to which XP enables software project teams to coordinate expertise is unknown. Drawing on the agile development and expertise coordination literatures, we examine the role of collective ownership and coding standards as processes and practices that govern coordination in software project teams. We examine the relationship between collective ownership, coding standards, expertise coordination, and software project technical quality in a field study of 56 software project teams comprising 509 software developers. We found that collective ownership and coding standards play a role in improving software project technical quality. We also found that collective ownership and coding standards moderated the relationship between expertise coordination and software project technical quality, with collective ownership attenuating the relationship and coding standards strengthening the relationship. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Information Systems Department, Sam M. Walton College of Business, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, U.S.A.

    Likoebe M Maruping, Xiaojun Zhang & Viswanath Venkatesh

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  1. Likoebe M Maruping
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  2. Xiaojun Zhang
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  3. Viswanath Venkatesh
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Correspondence to Likoebe M Maruping.

Appendix

Appendix

Scales for XP practices

All items use a 7-point Likert scale using ‘strongly disagree’ and ‘strongly agree’ as anchors.

Collective ownership

  1. 1

    Anyone on this team can change existing code at any time.

  2. 2

    A unit of code can only be changed by the individual who developed it. (r)

  3. 3

    Members of this team feel comfortable changing any part of the existing code at any time.

  4. 4

    We all feel a sense of responsibility for the system code.

  5. 5

    If anyone wants to change a piece of code, they need the permission of the individual(s) that coded it. (r)

Coding standards

  1. 1

    We have a set of agreed upon coding standards in this team.

  2. 2

    Members of this team have a shared understanding of how code is to be written.

  3. 3

    Everyone on this team uses their own standards for coding. (r)

  4. 4

    We do not follow an agreed upon standard for coding software for this project. (r)

  5. 5

    All developers on this team code software according to their own set of standards. (r)

Note: (r) denotes a reverse coded item.

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Maruping, L., Zhang, X. & Venkatesh, V. Role of collective ownership and coding standards in coordinating expertise in software project teams. Eur J Inf Syst 18, 355–371 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/ejis.2009.24

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