Team Factors and Failure Processing Efficiency: An Exploratory Study of Closed and Open Source Software Development

Researchers in the field of software engineering economics have associated team factors, such as team size and team experience, with productivity and quality. Since distributed and open source development have gained significance in the past few years, further empirical investigation is needed. Our study contributes to the empirical body of knowledge by addressing this development. In particular, we investigate the association between team factors and failure processing efficiency for closed source software releases of a large commercial software vendor and for open source software projects registered with SourceForge.net. We find significant links between team experience and the failure processing efficiency. However, our data does not show any evidence for adverse effects of distributed development. Our results further suggest that service level agreements and process governance are good tools to guarantee satisfactory processing times.