Balancing Self-directed and Peer-induced Efforts in an Information Technology Collaborative Software Development: A Network Approach

In a collaboration network environment for software development, it is a highly desirable managerial objective to establish and maintain a stable balance of ongoing engineering activities and workload distributions among the project engineers. Grounded on a theoretical framework and associated simulation models to understand the emergence of this balance, we show that conditioning the development process to remain confined in a stable region of the dynamics could be delicate affair in real applications. Nevertheless, we demonstrate that it is technically feasible to control ongoing development by suitably restricting relevant parameters of the production dynamics, which amounts to achieving a stable balance between self-directed and peer-induced work efforts expended by the project engineers in building the final software product. Strategies for realizing this condition have important implications for managerial decision-making in collaborative software development.