Socio-technical Interactions in OSS Development

This study is going to provide directions to open source practitioners to better organize their projects to achieve greater performance. In this research, we try to understand socio-technical interactions in a system development context by examining the joint effect of developer team structure and open source software architecture on OSS development performance. We hypothesize that developer team structure and software architecture significantly moderate each other‘s effect on OSS development performance. Empirical evidence supports our hypotheses and suggests that Larger teams tend to produce more favorable project performance when the project being developed has a high level of structural interdependency while projects with a low level of structural interdependency require smaller teams in order to achieve better project performance. Moreover, centralized teams tend to have a positive impact on project performance when the OSS project has a high level of structural interdependency. However, when a project has a low level of structural interdependency, centralized teams can impair project performance. Keywords—Open source software, collaboration network, social network analysis, software architecture, software project performance, network centralization, software structural interdependency