the results of that work with the conclusions reached in this study. Organizational culture is fairly consistent across geography because the same process has been used in all locations of the company for some time.

6. ThReATs To VALIDITY

construct Validity: The data collection on a system the size of Windows Vista is automated. Metrics and other data were collected using production level quality tools and we have no reason to believe that there were large errors in measurement. internal Validity: In Section 5 we listed observations about the distributed development process used at Microsoft. While we have reason to believe that these alleviate the problems associated with distributed development, a causal relationship has not been empirically shown. Further study is required to determine to what extent each of these practices actually helps. In addition, although we attempted an exhaustive search of differences in characteristics between distributed a collocated binaries, it is possible that they differ in some way not measured by our analysis in Section 4. 3. external Validity: It is unclear how well our results generalize to other situations. We examine one large project and there is a dearth of literature that examines the effect of distributed development on post-release failures. We have identified similarities in Microsoft’s development process with other successful distributed projects, which may indicate important principles and strategies to use. There are many ways in which distributed software projects may vary and the particular characteristics must be taken into account. For instance, we have no reason to expect that a study of an outsourced project would yield the same results as ours.

7. concLusIon

In our study we divide binaries based on the level of geographic dispersion of their commits. We studied the post-release failures for the Windows Vista code base and concluded that distributed development has little to no effect. We posit that this negative result is a significant finding as it refutes, at least in the context of Vista development, conventional wisdom and widely held beliefs about distributed development. When coupled with prior work, 1, 11 our results support the conclusion that there are scenarios in which distributed development can work for large software projects. Based on earlier work, 18 our study shows that organizational differences are much stronger indicators of quality than geography. An organizationally compact but geographically distributed project would be better than a geographically local, organizationally distributed project.

We have presented a number of observations about the development practices at Microsoft which may mitigate some of the hurdles associated with distributed development, but no causal link has been established. There is a strong similarity between these practices and those that have worked for other teams in the past1 as well as solutions proposed in other work. 10 Directly examining the effects of these practices is an important direction for continued research in globally distributed software development. Devanbu and Bird acknowledge that their work is in part supported by the National Science Foundation, under Grant NSF-SOD 0613949.

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Christian Bird ( [e-mail]), university of California, Davis, Davis, Ca.

Nachiappan Nagappan ( [e-mail]), Microsoft research, redmond, Wa.

Premkumar Devanbu
( [e-mail]), university of
California, Davis, Davis, Ca.

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Harald Gall ( [e-mail]), university of zurich, zurich, switzerland.

Brendan Murphy (bmurphy@microsoft. com), Microsoft research, Cambridge, england.

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