Organizational volatility and its effects on software defects

The key premise of an organization is to allow more efficient production, including production of high quality software. To achieve that, an organization defines roles and reporting relationships. Therefore, changes in organization's structure are likely to affect product's quality. We propose and investigate a relationship between developer-centric measures of organizational change and the probability of customerreported defects in the context of a large software project. We find that the proximity to an organizational change is significantly associated with reductions in software quality. We also replicate results of several prior studies of software quality supporting findings that code, change, and developer characteristics affect fault-proneness. In contrast to prior studies we find that distributed development decreases quality. Furthermore, recent departures from an organization were associated with increased probability of customerreported defects, thus demonstrating...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: SIGSOFT
• Authors: Audris Mockus
• Keywords: Organizational Change, SIGSOFT 2010, Software, Software Engineering