Human CapItal and InformatIon teCHnology professIonals

Social capital is an important network based intangible asset with a potential for maximizing individual and team productivity in a social setting like software development. It is important to investigate intervening factors that challenge software development productivity. In this paper, the authors mixed method approach harnesses a structural equation model (SEM) for its quantitative part to establish a paradigm for understanding the effects of social factors for software development organizations. The proposed SEM model measures the correlations between several potential factors associated with productivity, social productivity, and social capital that are chosen as latent variables. For the qualitative phase, an industrial focus group is used to single out these factors and their association with potential social aspects. Quantitative data is gathered from a survey conducted at a university. The qualitative phase encompasses an industrial focus group, initially starting with the factors from the literature and refined through participants’ field experience. Findings indicate that a high correlation exists between several social factors that are reported by the focus group. Finally, initial results suggest that understanding the factors that affect social capital in software development is essential for building and sustaining highly productive development environments. DOI: 10.4018/jhcitp.2012040104 International Journal of Human Capital and Information Technology Professionals, 3(2), 40-62, April-June 2012 41 Copyright © 2012, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. to improve organizational efficiency. Today, it is commonly accepted as the productivity of a software development team not only depends on the degree of its members’ experience, skills, and competences but also how well its members socially interact. In fact, it is not surprising to observe that experiencing greater production success heavily relies on how the teams socially communicate, and utilize their interactions. These interactions however, should be governed and coordinated to achieve the desired productivity levels both for an individual and a team. By understanding software development as a social activity (Dittrich, Floyd, & Klischewski, 2002), we begin to investigate social capital as a network-based shared norm or a value that supports collective outcomes and to explore the related factors for software development. The goal is to measure the socioeconomic constraints for organizations by exploring several social and productivity factors that are highlighted by software development participants. A software development organization should enable their teams to use their social capital (for example while creating optimal team configurations) and use this value to understand and measure the needs to improve its economically effective levels. The process of forming a conceptual definition of social capital and customizing a method for its measurement are both very challenging tasks especially in applied settings. Nevertheless, we claim that social capital should be considered as an adequate value to be identified, measured and used for productivity improvement in a software development environment. There are several context specific definitions of the term social capital emerged and used within the empirical research. Social capital should be a factor to improve the productivity of social structure. It should be defined as a network based (hidden) resource identified by the size and the value of an individual’s social connections. Therefore, understanding the notion of social capital has a potential of improving social aspects of software development. Our research agenda has two important objectives: First determining factors that are affecting productivity and second, investigating a method or a model to determine a way to measure the correlations among these factors. In our preliminary study (Yilmaz & O’Connor, 2011), we have analyzed the relationship between the social factors potentially affecting productivity and productivity based upon software productivity literature refined by our focus group studies. Consequently, we designed a SEM model to investigate productivity factors and sought empirical support for our proposed approach. Based on the selected data collected from a preliminary study, in this work, first we plan to revise our previous models, and second we design a new SEM model to examine the relationship between social productivity and social capital. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: In the next section, we introduce several definitions for the social and value dynamics of software development landscapes such as software artifacts, productivity, the value, social capital, social productivity. The following section describes some of the techniques that are used in social network analysis (SNA). The next section describes the analysis models and methods proposed and used in this research. It presents some of our findings that validates our proposed model, and verifies our empirical approach. Finally, the last section concludes the paper with a brief summary of contributions and some directions for future research. SOCIAL AND VALUE DYNAMICS Social dynamics, also known as the dynamics of human interactions, is a multi-disciplinary field of science that is concerned with analyzing socialites or social systems formed by participants and their interactions. This section surveys several important concepts and definitions and the foundations of social and the value dynamics of a software organization. These concepts and definitions highlight the important points of the Social Aspects of Software Engineering (SASE) (Dittrich et al., 2002). Ultimately, SASE helps 42 International Journal of Human Capital and Information Technology Professionals, 3(2), 40-62, April-June 2012 Copyright © 2012, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. us to understand social and value dynamics of a software organization. It promotes cooperation within software teams and organizations and helps them to respond better for the dynamic and future trends of software development. We start this section by defining a software artifact. Next, we identify sources of capital that are used in any production process. Moreover, we define both social and human capital, and further the concept of social productivity is introduced. The Software Artifact The cost of quality attributes in the software development activities is heavily based on interaction skills of individuals and teams. Specifically, one of the most important of the output of these skills is the software artifact. Software artifact is defined as; “The products, process and software developed by human efforts are considered as artifacts (or tools) that embody human knowledge” (Shariq, 1998, p. 11). “A software artifact is a social artifact, which means it is a product of social beings or an outcome of their behaviors. Software artifact is a unit of material, in the form of a document, presentation, or code, that is developed as a part of, or as a contribution to, the final solution to the users” (Tsui, 2004, p. 3). According to Baldwin and Clark, an artifact is a quintessential outcome of both human intelligence and endeavor. Nevertheless, knowledge-based artifacts (e.g., software, computers, etc.) are interconnected group of entities usually created by a team of workers (Baldwin & Clark, 2000). Morisio et al. point out that the artifacts produced in a software process are complex creations and channeling of the human acumen identified several different characteristics. Tsui (2004) describes the notion of software artifacts as a “unit of material”, which can be in any form such as documentation or source code. Its life-cycle starts from requirements analysis phase follows through product development and documentation. Several entities can be accepted as software artifacts. For example, manuals or guide booklets, and even internal deliverables inside the organization. Software artifacts are considered as smaller and manageable parts of a software project. They are useful touchstones for implementing the concept of separation of concerns (Parnas & Clements, 1986), which values the division of the effort and knowledge by coordinating the software engineering tasks and decisions (Baldwin & Clark, 2000). Shariq suggested that the knowledge should be considered as an outcome of human activities, which essentially produces knowledge artifacts, and knowledge networks are intervened by these artifacts (Shariq, 1998). Cluts conducted a case study to develop a framework based on the connections between people and their activities where artifacts are described to contain a backlog of the past events and connections among them (Cluts, 2003).