Communication, coordination and control in distributed development: an OSS case study

It has been claimed that distributed development practices in OSS development may be a model for enterprise development practices of the future. With this in mind, we have conducted a study of one OSS project, namely ArgoUML, with a view to understanding development practice within the project, and specifically to considering possible differences from traditional (non-OSS) distributed development conducted in a commercial project. We do this by explicitly considering issues of communication, coordination and control. Our findings suggest that primary differences lie in control and resulting project structures, motivated through differing goals. We comment on the open question of how the advantages of one development context can be realised in the other.