Does distributed development affect software quality? An empirical case study of Windows Vista

It is widely believed that distributed software development is riskier and more challenging than collocated development. Prior literature on distributed development in software engineering and other fields discuss various challenges, including cultural barriers, expertise transfer difficulties, and communication and coordination overhead. We evaluate this conventional belief by examining the overall development of Windows Vista and comparing the postrelease failures of components that were developed in a distributed fashion with those that were developed by collocated teams. We found a negligible difference in failures. This difference becomes even less significant when controlling for the number of developers working on a binary. We also examine component characteristics such as code churn, complexity, dependency information, and test code coverage and find very little difference between distributed and collocated components. Further, we examine the software process and phenomena...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ICSE
• Authors: Christian Bird, Nachiappan Nagappan, Premkumar T. Devanbu, Harald Gall, Brendan Murphy
• Keywords: Distributed Development, ICSE 2009, Software Development, Software Engineering, Vista Development Cycle