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

Abstract

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.

Exploring Socio-Technical Dependencies in Open Source Software Projects

“…Understanding socio-technical dependency through the analysis of congruence between the social and technical dimension is vital for supporting collaboration and coordination in OSS projects [36] [3]. For instance, developers who are modifying interdependent code modules but not communicating may introduce potential future integration problems.…”

“…Rather they voluntarily join and contribute to the project. These people belong to discrete geographical locations having significant difference in background, timezone, language and cultural distances [36]. Often simple communication media like email, wiki, chat [44] are used to establish communication, collaboration among the community members.…”

“…Research towards OSS projects can be classified along several distinct facets, namely, Social [40] [30], Technical [31][4], Socio-Technical [36] [3], Legal [39], and Economical [12]. In this paper, however we focus on the first three facets, i.e., Social, Technical and Socio-Technical.…”

A brief method to assess the association of socio and technical dependencies on software quality

“…Therefore, good congruence through communication among developers based on architecture design certainly helps explain the faulty conceptualization in some parts of the system [40]. However, little research has been done on how STC influence software quality when coordination requirement and actual coordination are congruent.…”

“…Coordination needs is more significant in open source project since the developer team is distribute [40]. To conduct this research, Yetus project with 20 developers was chosen.…”