Organizational social structures for software engineering

Abstract

Software engineering evolved from a rigid process to a dynamic interplay of people (e.g., stakeholders or developers). Organizational and social literature call this interplay an Organizational Social Structure (OSS). Software practitioners still lack a systematic way to select, analyze, and support OSSs best fitting their problems (e.g., software development). We provide the state-of-the-art in OSSs, and discuss mechanisms to support OSS-related decisions in software engineering (e.g., choosing the OSS best fitting development scenarios). Our data supports two conclusions. First, software engineering focused on building software using project teams alone, yet these are one of thirteen OSS flavors from literature. Second, an emerging OSS should be further explored for software development: social networks. This article represents a first glimpse at OSS-aware software engineering, that is, to engineer software using OSSs best fit for the problem.