Emergence of developer teams in the collaboration network

Abstract

Developer teams may naturally emerge independent of managerial decisions, organizational structure, or work locations in large software. Such self organized collaboration teams of developers can be traced from the source code repositories. In this paper, we identify the developer teams in the collaboration network in order to present the work team evolution and the factors that affect team stability for a large, globally developed, commercial software. Our findings indicate that: a) Number of collaboration teams do not change over time, b) Size of the collaboration teams increases over time, c) Team activity is not related with team size, d) Factors related to team size, location and activity affect the stability of teams over time.