{"id":160155,"date":"2009-05-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-05-01T00:00:00","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-3\/"},"modified":"2018-10-16T20:11:30","modified_gmt":"2018-10-17T03:11:30","slug":"does-distributed-development-affect-software-quality-an-empirical-case-study-of-windows-vista-3","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-3\/","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 discuss 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 discuss 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":"IEEE Computer Society","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering","msr_editors":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_issue":"","msr_journal":"","msr_number":"","msr_organization":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_page_range_start":"","msr_page_range_end":"","msr_series":"","msr_volume":"","msr_copyright":"Copyright \u00a9 2007 IEEE. Reprinted from IEEE Computer Society.This material is posted here with permission of the IEEE. Internal or personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint\/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the IEEE by writing to pubs-permissions@ieee.org.By choosing to view this document, you agree to all provisions of the copyright laws protecting it.","msr_conference_name":"Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering","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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