Skip to main content
Download book PDF
View expanded cover

IFIP International Conference on Open Source Systems

OSS 2013: Open Source Software: Quality Verification pp 109–126Cite as

Socio-technical Congruence in OSS Projects: Exploring Conway’s Law in FreeBSD

  • Conference paper

Part of the IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology book series (IFIPAICT,volume 404)

Abstract

Software development requires effective communication, coordination and collaboration among developers working on interdependent modules of the same project. The need for coordination is even more evident in open source projects where development is often more dispersed and distributed. In this paper, we study the match between the coordination needs established by the technical domain (i.e. source code) and the actual coordination activities carried out by the development team, such hypothetical match is also known as socio-technical congruence. We carry out our study by empirically examining Conway’s law in FreeBSD project. Our study shows that the congruence measure is significantly high in FreeBSD and that the congruence value remains stable as the project matured.

Keywords

  • Open Source Project
  • Coordination Network
  • Design Structure Matrix
  • Stable Release
  • Developer Community

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Download conference paper PDF

References

  1. Conway, M.E.: How Do Committees Invent? Datamation 14(4), 28–31 (1968)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Kwan, I., Schröter, A., Damian, D.: Does Socio-Technical Congruence Have an Effect on Software Build Success? A Study of Coordination in a Software Project. TSE 37(3), 307–324 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Ovaska, P., Rossi, M., Marttiin, P.: Architecture as a coordination tool in multi-site software development. Soft. Process: Improvement & Prac., 233–247 (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  4. de Souza, C.R.B., Quirk, S., Trainer, E., Redmiles, D.F.: Supporting collaborative software development through the visualization of socio-technical dependencies. In: International ACM Conference on Supporting Group Work, pp. 147–156 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Scacchi, W.: Understanding the requirements for developing open source software systems. IEE Proceedings Software 149(1), 24–39 (2002)

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  6. Bendifallah, S., Scacchi, W.: Work Structures and Shifts: An Empirical Analysis of Software Specification Teamwork. In: 11th ICSE, pp. 260–270 (1989)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Jongdae, H., Chisu, W., Byungjeong, L.: Extracting Development Organization from Open Source Software. In: 16th APSEC, pp. 441–448. IEEE (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Raymond, E.S.: The new hacker’s dictionary, 3rd edn. MIT Press, Cambridge (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Nagappan, N., Murphy, B., Basili, V.R.: Architectures, Coordination, and Distance: Conway’s Law and Beyond. Journal IEEE Software 16(5), 63–70 (1999)

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  10. Kwan, I., Cataldo, M., Damian, D.: Conway’s Law Revisited: The Evidence for a Task-Based Perspective. IEEE Software 29(1), 90–93 (2012)

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  11. Brooks, F.P.: The Mythical Man-Month, Anniversary Edition. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company (1995)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Nagappan, N., Murphy, B., Basili, V.R.: The influence of organizational structure on software quality: an empirical case study. In: ICSE 2008, pp. 521–530 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Cataldo, M., Wagstrom, P.A., Herbsleb, J.D., Carley, K.M.: Identification of coordination requirements: Implications for the design of collaboration and awareness tools. In: CSCW, Banff, Canada (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Browning, T.: Applying the design structure matrix to system decomposition and integration problems: a review and new directions. IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management 48(3), 292–306 (2001)

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  15. Sosa, M.E., Eppinger, S.D., Rowles, C.M.: The misalignment of product architecture and organizational structure in complex product development. Management Science 50(12), 1674–1689 (2004)

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  16. Jingwei, W., Holt, R.C., Hassan, A.E.: Empirical Evidence for SOC Dynamics in Software Evolution. In: ICSM, pp. 244–254 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Herraiz, I.: A statistical examination of the evolution and properties of libre software. In: ICSM, pp. 439–442 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Herraiz, I., Gonzalez-Barahona, J.M., Robles, G., German, D.M.: On the prediction of the evolution of libre software projects. In: ICSM, pp. 405–414 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Fogel, K., Bar, M.: Open Source Development with CVS: Learn How to Work With Open Source Software. The Coriolis Group (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Herbsleb, J.D., Grinter, R.E.: Splitting the Organization and Integrating the Code: Conway’s Law Revisited. In: ICSE, pp. 85–95. ACM Press, New York (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Baldwin, C.Y., Clark, K.B.: Design Rules: The Power of Modularity. MIT (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Colfer, L., Baldwin, C.Y.: The Mirroring Hypothesis: Theory, Evidence and Exceptions, Working paper. Harvard Business School (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Bowman, I.T., Holt, R.C.: Software Architecture Recovery Using Conway’s Law. In: CASCON 1998, pp. 123–133 (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  24. FreeBSD (2013), http://www.freebsd.org/

  25. Mathieu, G., Mens, T.: A framework for analyzing and visualizing open source software ecosystems. In: IWPSE-EVOL, pp. 42–47 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Daniel, M.G.: Using software trails to reconstruct the evolution of software. Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution 16(6), 367–384 (2004)

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  27. Wang, Y., Guo, D., Shi, H.: Measuring the Evolution of Open Source Software Systems with their Communities. ACM SIGSOFT Notes 32(6) (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  28. Zhang, W., Yang, Y., Wang, Q.: Network Analysis of OSS Evolution: An Empirical Study on ArgoUML Project. In: IWPSE-EVOL, pp. 71–80 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  29. Apache POI-Java API for Microsoft Documents (2013), http://poi.apache.org/

  30. jsoup: Java HTML Parser (2013), http://jsoup.org/

  31. Yamauchi, Y., Yokozawa, M., Shinohara, T., Ishida, T.: Collaboration with Lean Media: How Open-source Software Succeeds. In: CSCW, pp. 329–338 (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  32. Dayani-Fard, H., Yu, Y., Mylopoulos, J., Andritsos, P.: Improving the build architecture of legacy C/C++ software systems. In: Cerioli, M. (ed.) FASE 2005. LNCS, vol. 3442, pp. 96–110. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  33. Mahbubul Syeed, M.M.: Binoculars: Comprehending Open Source Projects through graphs. In: Hammouda, I., Lundell, B., Mikkonen, T., Scacchi, W. (eds.) OSS 2012. IFIP AICT, vol. 378, pp. 350–355. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  34. Bolici, F., Howison, J., Crowston, K.: Coordination without discussion? Socio-technical congruence and Stigmergy in Free and Open Source Software projects. In: 2nd STC, ICSE (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  35. Kazman, R., Carrière, S.J.: Playing Detective: Reconstructing Software Architecture from Available Evidence, Technical Re- p ort CMU/SEI-97-TR-010, Carnegie Mellon University (1997)

    Google Scholar 

  36. Syeed, M.M., Altonen, T., Hammouda, I., Systä, T.: Tool Assisted Analysis of Open Source Projects: A Multi-facet Challenge. IJOSSP 3(2) (2011)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tampere University of Technology, Finland

    M. M. Mahbubul Syeed & Imed Hammouda

Authors
  1. M. M. Mahbubul Syeed
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Imed Hammouda
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Free University of Bozen/Bolzano, 39100, Bolzano, Italy

    Etiel Petrinja, Giancarlo Succi, Nabil El Ioini & Alberto Sillitti, ,  & 

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

Copyright information

© 2013 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing

About this paper

Cite this paper

Syeed, M.M.M., Hammouda, I. (2013). Socio-technical Congruence in OSS Projects: Exploring Conway’s Law in FreeBSD. In: Petrinja, E., Succi, G., El Ioini, N., Sillitti, A. (eds) Open Source Software: Quality Verification. OSS 2013. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 404. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38928-3_8

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38928-3_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-38927-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-38928-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)