Monday, July 15, 2013

Distributed Development Considered Harmful?

Distributed development is a good use of contemporary collaboration technology and the universal talent pool of software engineers. However, it  also comes with various possible challenges.

Imagine reducing costs dramatically by having multiple teams that are thousands of miles away from each other, living in completely different time zones. Saving money is good, but also imagine what such a distributed development scenario may lead to: Difficulty in inter-team communication, lack of coordination due to communication difficulties and ultimately higher post-release bugs. Therefore, it is important to take a look at the effects of distributed development. In other words, do we benefit from distributed development or does it come with unwanted side effects?

During my 2012 summer internship at Microsoft Research (MSR) at Redmond, I researched on distributed development and I was lucky to work with the incredible researchers of the Empirical Software Engineering (ESE) Group. It was a great learning experience and I am particularly thankful to Thomas Zimmermann, Christian Bird, Nachiappan Nagappan and Tim Menzies for their mentorship and support. A summary of the research that we have conducted regarding distributed development is recently published in the "Software Engineering in Practice" track of "International Conference on Software Engineering". Below is the abstract and the link of this paper. I hope you enjoy it.


ABSTRACT: 
We offer a case study illustrating three rules for reporting research to industrial practitioners. Firstly, report “relevant” results; e.g. this paper explores the effects of distributed development on software products.
Second: “recheck” old results if new results call them into question. Many papers say distributed development can be harmful to software quality. Previous work by Bird et al. allayed that concern but a recent paper by Posnett et al. suggests that the Bird result was biased by the kinds of files it explored. Hence, this paper rechecks that result and finds significant differences in Microsoft products (Office 2010) between software built by distributed or collocated teams. At first glance, this recheck calls into question the widespread practice of distributed development.
Our third rule is to “reflect” on results to avoid confusing practitioners with an arcane mathematical analysis. For example, on reflection, we found that the effect size of the differences seen in the collocated and distributed software was so small that it need not concern industrial practitioners.
Our conclusion is that at least for Microsoft products, distributed development is not considered harmful.
The pdf of the article can be found here: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2486908