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Insights into Global Software Development: A Study on the FreeBSD Project

This study explores global software development, focusing on the FreeBSD project, a highly respected open-source operating system. Conducted by Diomidis Spinellis at the Athens University of Economics and Business, the research reveals insights about methodologies, productivity, and quality in a distributed development environment. Key findings include the impact of human interactions and cultural diversity on productivity, the effective practices adopted by a global team of ~350 developers, and the significance of asynchronous communication. The study underscores that distance does not negatively affect productivity, thus offering valuable benchmarks for global outsourcing.

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Insights into Global Software Development: A Study on the FreeBSD Project

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  1. Global Software Development in the FreeBSD Project Diomidis Spinellis Athens University of Economics and Business and FreeBSD

  2. Outline • FreeBSD • Methodology • Findings • Global development • Productivity and quality • Human interactions

  3. Rationale • Rough side of global software development • “Setting benchmarks in global outsourcing” • “If it works there, it works everywhere” • Practices that work • Repository data • Mining incidental data • Drawing conclusions

  4. FreeBSD • Complete operating system • Open source • High performance application servers • Networked embedded systems • Derived from BSD Unix • Focus on stability and reliability • smallbusiness.yahoo.com • Part of Apple’s Mac OS X

  5. Family Tree

  6. Development Documentation • ~350 developers • Documentation Third party application ports ~15700 Operating system utilities ~9.8MLoC Kernel ~3.8MLoC

  7. Development Facilities • CVS (12 years of historical data; >938k) • Problem reports (>95k) • Mailing lists (>100) • Tinderbox • Web site • Developer’s handbook • Release engineering • Browsable CVS • Mailing lists • PRs

  8. Development Process • Unpaid volunteers • Teams • Core • Release engineering • Security • Ports • Donations • Committer etiquette • Mentoring

  9. Global Development

  10. Around the Globe

  11. Division of Work

  12. Hold and Advance

  13. … and Fix Closed GNATS entries per area

  14. Roads and Buildings

  15. Round the Clock

  16. Passing Work Around

  17. Productivity and Quality • Round the clock development • Software and hardware diversity • Lack of face-to-face communication • Asynchronous communication • A more rigorous process is required • Cultural diversity

  18. Productivity • More developers produce more software(base case)  r=0.67 (95% CI)

  19. Productivity • … but developer distance doesn’t affect productivity.  r=-0.14 (95% CI)

  20. Code Style  r=0.05 (95% CI)

  21. Defect Density  r=0.07 (95% CI)

  22. Human Interactions • Look for neighbors • Cooperating developers • Mentors and mentees Jan Van Haasteren: Neighbours

  23. Cooperating developers • Mean distance between • any two FreeBSD developers: 6,701km • 4010 instances of commits • Same file • Same day • Different developers • Mean distance:6,489km

  24. Mentors and mentees

  25. FreeBSD is Global • Round the clock development • No ill effects on • Productivity • Code quality • Bug density • Distance • Doesn’t show up in ad hoc cooperation • Appears to matter in mentoring

  26. Tesekur Ederim! • http://www.freebsd.org • http:/www.dmst.aueb.gr/dds

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