Governing the Commons: Code Ownership and Code-Clones in Large-Scale Software Development
CoRR(2024)
Abstract
Context: In software development organizations employing weak or collective
ownership, different teams are allowed and expected to autonomously perform
changes in various components. This creates diversity both in the knowledge of,
and in the responsibility for, individual components.
Objective: Our objective is to understand how and why different teams
introduce technical debt in the form of code clones as they change different
components.
Method: We collected data about change size and clone introductions made by
ten teams in eight components which was part of a large industrial software
system. We then designed a Multi-Level Generalized Linear Model (MLGLM), to
illustrate the teams' differing behavior. Finally, the results were reported to
the studied organization, responses were recorded and thematically coded.
Results: The results show that teams do behave differently in different
components, and the feedback from the teams indicates that this method of
illustrating team behavior can be useful as a complement to traditional summary
statistics of ownership.
Conclusions: We find that our model-based approach produces useful
visualizations of team introductions of code clones as they change different
components. Practitioners stated that the visualizations gave them insights
that were useful, and by comparing with an average team, inter-team comparisons
can be avoided. Thus, this has the potential to be a useful feedback tool for
teams in software development organizations that employ weak or collective
ownership.
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