Robert J. Sandusky

PhD Candidate, Library and Information Science,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“INFORMATION MANAGEMENT IN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT:
VARIETIES, CONTEXTS, PROCESSES AND SOCIAL ORDER"

Monday, March 1, 2004
11:00 a.m. – 12:00 noon
Room 403, IS Building

Abstract: This project addresses the question of how free and open source software development communities manage knowledge and activity as they address software problems. Software problem management is a process common to virtually all software development projects. I approach software problem management as an organizational process through the close examination of bug reports from the bug report repository maintained by a large open source software development project. Using grounded theory techniques and by performing content analysis on the bug reports themselves, I am identifying the varieties of phenomena present in the bug reports and proposing relationships between those phenomena.

In this presentation, I will highlight some of the phenomena that have been found, including information, activity, context, process, and social order. For example, the community often links different bug reports together, creating bug report networks that simultaneously change both the information order and the social order. I will also show how software problem management work can be interpreted using theories of coordination and cooperation, sensemaking, and negotiation. Finally, I will present future directions for this line of research, including application of this approach to other distributed collective practices, and the potential impacts of this research on tool development and software problem management practice.