“There and Back Again?” On the Influence of Software Community Dispersion Over Productivity

Estimating and understanding productivity still represents a crucial task for researchers and practitioners. Researchers spent significant effort identifying the factors that influence software developers’ productivity, providing several approaches for analyzing and predicting such a metric. Although different works focused on evaluating the impact of human factors on productivity, little is known about the influence of cultural/geographical diversity in software development communities. Indeed, in previous studies, researchers treated cultural aspects like an abstract concept without providing a quantitative representation. This work provides an empirical assessment of the relationship between cultural and geographical dispersion of a development community—namely, how diverse a community is in terms of cultural attitudes and geographical collocation of the members who belong to it—and its productivity. To reach our aim, we built a statistical model that contained product and socio-technical factors as independent variables to assess the correlation with productivity, i.e., the number of commits performed in a given time. Then, we ran our model considering data of 25 open-source communities on GitHub. Results of our study indicate that cultural and geographical dispersion impact productivity, thus encouraging managers and practitioners to consider such aspects during all the phases of the software development lifecycle.