Balanced Knowledge Distribution among Software Development Teams -- Observations from Open-Source and Closed-Source Software Development

TL;DR

This paper introduces the ConceptRealm, a novel model to measure and analyze knowledge distribution among software development teams using textual data, helping to understand the impact of developer turnover on team knowledge.

Contribution

It presents the ConceptRealm model based on LDA to represent knowledge distribution, validated on open-source and closed-source projects, providing insights into developer alignment and turnover effects.

Findings

ConceptRealm effectively models team knowledge at a high level.

Developers' concept alignment predicts issue handling success.

Leaving key developers disrupts team knowledge continuity.

Abstract

In software development teams, developer turnover is among the primary reasons for project failures as it leads to a great void of knowledge and strain for the newcomers. Unfortunately, no established methods exist to measure how knowledge is distributed among development teams. Knowing how this knowledge evolves and is owned by key developers in a project helps managers reduce risks caused by turnover. To this end, this paper introduces a novel, realistic representation of domain knowledge distribution: the ConceptRealm. To construct the ConceptRealm, we employ a latent Dirichlet allocation model to represent textual features obtained from 300k issues and 1.3M comments from 518 open-source projects. We analyze whether the newly emerged issues and developers share similar concepts or how aligned the developers' concepts are with the team over time. We also investigate the impact of leaving members on the frequency of concepts. Finally, we evaluate the soundness of our approach to closed-source software, thus allowing the validation of the results from a practical standpoint. We find out that the ConceptRealm can represent the high-level domain knowledge within a team and can be utilized to predict the alignment of developers with issues. We also observe that projects exhibit many keepers independent of project maturity and that abruptly leaving keepers harm the team's concept familiarity.