This paper argues that the architecture of a codebase is a critical factor that lies at the heart of the open source development process. We define two observable properties of an architecture: (1) modularity and (2) option value. Developers can often make informed judgments about modularity and...

The control relationship between project managers and team members is a central aspect of the working of any Information System (I/S) design team. This paper combines research on managerial control and team-member control in order to explore a range of control behaviors that can affect the...

In this paper we present the results of our effort estimation analysis of a European Space Agency database consisting of 108 software development projects. We develop and evaluate simple empirical effort estimation models that include only those productivity factors found to be significant for...

We study the determinants of contract choice in offshore software development projects and examine how the choice of contract and other factors in the project affect project profits accruing to the software vendor. Using data collected on 93 offshore projects from a leading Indian software...

Software contracting is a multi-faceted issue that involves legal, economic, managerial and technological considerations. To better understand the economic aspect of software contracting, this paper provides a summary review of software development contracts, followed by a gametheoretic model...

Custom software development projects have special informational attributes that have challenged managers for many years: they are associated with information asymmetries regarding user valuation and developer costs, relationship-specific investments, and a resulting likelihood of positive...

Centralization and formalization have previously been employed in research designs investigating organizational innovation. The results, however, have been mixed. Three arguments are raised toward explaining this inconsistency. First, innovation is a multi-phased process in which the influence...

Uncertain and dynamic environments present fundamental challenges to managers of the new product development process. Between successive product generations, significant evolutions can occur in both the customer needs a product must address and the technologies it employs to satisfy these needs....

Like all teams, knowledge teams must acquire and manage critical resources in order to accomplish their work. The most critical resource for knowledge teams is expertise, or specialized skills and knowledge, but the mere presence of expertise on a team is insufficient to produce high-quality...

Although product development research often focuses on activities prior to product launch, for long-lived, adaptable products like software, development can continue over the entire product life cycle. For managers of these products the challenges are to predict when and how much the products...