Establishing Personal Trust-based Connections in Distributed Teams

Correspondence Filippo Lanubile, Dipartimento di Informatica, University of Bari, Via Orabona, 4 – Dip. Informatica, 70125 Bari, Italy. Email: [email protected] Trust is a factor that dramatically contributes to the success or failure of distributed software teams. We present a research model showing that social communication between distant developers enables the affective appraisal of trustworthiness even from a distance, thus increasing project performance. To overcome the limitations of self-reported data, typically questionnaires, we focus on software projects following a pull request-based development model and approximate the overall performance of a software project with the history of successful collaborations occurring between developers.