{"id":158170,"date":"2009-08-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-08-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/msr-research-item\/does-distributed-development-affect-software-quality-an-empirical-case-study-of-windows-vista\/"},"modified":"2018-10-16T21:06:03","modified_gmt":"2018-10-17T04:06:03","slug":"does-distributed-development-affect-software-quality-an-empirical-case-study-of-windows-vista","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/does-distributed-development-affect-software-quality-an-empirical-case-study-of-windows-vista\/","title":{"rendered":"Does Distributed Development Affect Software Quality? An Empirical Case Study of Windows Vista"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"asset-content\">\n<p>Existing literature on distributed development in software engineering, and other fields discusses various challenges, including cultural barriers, expertise transfer difficulties, and communication and coordination overhead. Conventional wisdom, in fact, holds that distributed software development is riskier and more challenging than collocated development. We revisit this belief, empirically studying the overall development of Windows Vista and comparing the post-release 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. Furthermore, we also found that component characteristics (such as code churn, complexity, dependency information, and test code coverage) differ very little between distributed and collocated components. Finally, we examine the software process used during the Vista development cycle and examine how it may have mitigated some of the difficulties of distributed development introduced in prior work in this area.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><!-- .asset-content --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Existing literature on distributed development in software engineering, and other fields discusses various challenges, including cultural barriers, expertise transfer difficulties, and communication and coordination overhead. Conventional wisdom, in fact, holds that distributed software development is riskier and more challenging than collocated development. We revisit this belief, empirically studying the overall development of Windows Vista and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":null,"msr_publishername":"Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"Communications of the ACM","msr_editors":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_issue":"8","msr_journal":"Communications of the ACM","msr_number":"","msr_organization":"","msr_pages_string":"85\u201393","msr_page_range_start":"85","msr_page_range_end":"93","msr_series":"","msr_volume":"52","msr_copyright":"Copyright \u00a9 2009 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and\/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept, ACM Inc., fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. The definitive version of this paper can be found at ACM's Digital Library --http:\/\/www.acm.org\/dl\/.","msr_conference_name":"","msr_doi":"","msr_arxiv_id":"","msr_s2_paper_id":"","msr_mag_id":"","msr_pubmed_id":"","msr_other_authors":"Nachiappan Nagappan, Premkumar Devanbu, Harald 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Devanbu","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"text","value":"Harald Gall","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"bmurphy","user_id":31259,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=bmurphy"}],"msr_impact_theme":[],"msr_research_lab":[],"msr_event":[],"msr_group":[144860],"msr_project":[170993,170901],"publication":[],"video":[],"msr-tool":[],"msr_publication_type":"article","related_content":{"projects":[{"ID":170993,"post_title":"Tools for Software Engineers","post_name":"tools-for-software-engineers","post_type":"msr-project","post_date":"2012-06-29 06:20:39","post_modified":"2021-11-12 09:09:39","post_status":"publish","permalink":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/project\/tools-for-software-engineers\/","post_excerpt":"The mission of Microsoft's One Engineering System (formerly known as Tools for Software Engineers) team is to enable the world's best product engineering teams with world-class tools and systems that help them ship products their customers love. 1ES provides tools and services to cover the full spectrum of the engineering life-cycle, from the developer desktop to product deployment. 1ES focuses on engineering solutions that mitigate the unique scale challenges that Microsoft teams face, both in&hellip;","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-project\/170993"}]}},{"ID":170901,"post_title":"Software Processes","post_name":"software-process","post_type":"msr-project","post_date":"2012-02-07 13:42:34","post_modified":"2020-09-10 09:41:50","post_status":"publish","permalink":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/project\/software-process\/","post_excerpt":"Our studies on software process include organizational impact on quality, agile software development, global software development, effort estimation, development branches, and build 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