Coordination Recipes for Tightly-Coupled Software Work in Open Source Software (OSS) Communities
Eunyoung Moon, James Howison · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2018
Software modularity has been considered to be key to the success of Open Source Software (OSS) communities. Modular (or loosely-coupled) software is held to be easier to work with for the typical participants in open source development who are loosely-organized, sporadically available, and value their autonomy. Yet sometimes tightly-coupled work is necessary, such as in restructuring efforts to renew desired architectures or in implementing new functionality which adds new dependencies across modules. In some communities corporate sponsorship may provide a parallel tightly-coupled organizational environment to accomplish tightly-coupled work, but for communities without corporate sponsorship we do not know how OSS contributors pursue and succeed in accomplishing tightly-coupled work. Accordingly this paper identities periods of tightly-coupled work in otherwise loosely-coupled communities, and characterizes how the tightly-coupled work was accomplished. We automatically analyzed the code in 72 software releases and identified 1,033 work episodes across three OSS communities without corporate sponsorship. Taking a configurational approach, we employed fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) at the episode level. Our fuzzy set analysis of 1,033 episodes identifies commonly occurring combinations of organizational configuration dimensions employed to get tightly-coupled software work done, which we label “coordination recipes” for accomplishing tightly-coupled software work. Our fsQCA modeling finds that OSS contributors tend to work in a tightly- coupled manner to get tightly-coupled software work done, increasing the capacity to manage interdependencies. Our results complement arguments about the capability of technological infrastructures to support temporary organizational connections. We discuss implications for research and provide practical insights into how practitioners may engage in OSS communities to achieve challenging but necessary tightly-coupled software work.