Thu 8 Nov 2018 15:30 - 15:52 at Horizons 10-11 - Ecosystems and Crowdsourcing Chair(s): Peter Rigby

Modern release engineering practices provide multiple benefits for software companies, but organizations have struggled when trying to adopt the most advanced practices, such as continuous delivery. It is not known in which contexts the most advanced practices are applicable and what can be achieved by adopting them. In this study, we discuss the effect of the organizational context on adopted release engineering practices and what outcomes are achieved with the practices. We study two organizational contexts: the startup and the large mature company context. The effect of the product context is mitigated by studying two case organizations with similar products, a rare research opportunity. We performed 18 interviews with various roles in the case organizations. The number of production environments, the number of customers, the control over the production environment, the available resources, the organization size and the distribution of the organization affected the release engineering practices and the ability to release frequently. Having less internal verification and more customer verification enabled fast feedback and customer experimentation in the startup context, but increased the number of production defects. However, having more internal verification in the large mature company context surprisingly did not prevent production defects. The organizational context had a large effect on how achievable modern release engineering practices, such as continuous delivery, were. In the startup context, the lack of resources was the main factor hindering the improvement of release engineering practices, while in the large mature company context, the number of stakeholders and products were the main factors.

Thu 8 Nov

Displayed time zone: Guadalajara, Mexico City, Monterrey change

15:30 - 17:00
Ecosystems and CrowdsourcingJournal-First / Research Papers at Horizons 10-11
Chair(s): Peter Rigby Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
15:30
22m
Talk
Comparison of release engineering practices in a large mature company and a startup
Journal-First
Eero Laukkanen , Maria Paasivaara IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark & Aalto University, Finland, Juha Itkonen , Casper Lassenius Aalto University, Finland and Simula Metropolitan Center for Digital Engineering, Norway
DOI
15:52
22m
Talk
Microtask Programming
Journal-First
Thomas LaToza George Mason University, Arturo Di Lecce , Fabio Ricci , W. Ben Towne , Andre van der Hoek University of California, Irvine
DOI
16:14
22m
Talk
Ecosystem-Level Determinants of Sustained Activity in Open-Source Projects: A Case Study of the PyPI Ecosystem
Research Papers
Marat Valiev Carnegie Mellon University, USA, Bogdan Vasilescu Carnegie Mellon University, Jim Herbsleb Carnegie Mellon University