Software Design X-Rays

Measure Coordination Needs

There’s a difference between code developed by a single individual versus code that’s more of a shared effort by multiple programmers and, thus, in need of coordination. Excess coordination needs correlate directly to increased lead times. What’s more surprising is that there may be a long-term cost, too, as our organizational patterns impact code quality in terms of defects.

In a groundbreaking study, researchers at Microsoft used organizational metrics such as the number of authors, the number of ex-authors, and organizational ownership to measure how well these factors predict the failure proneness of the resulting code. The research shows that organizational factors are better predictors of defects than any property ...