Understanding Collaborative Software Development: An Interview Study

In globally distributed software development, many software developers have to collaborate and deal with issues of collaboration. Although collaboration is challenging, collaborative development produces better software than any developer could produce alone. Unlike previous work which focuses on the proposal and evaluation of models and tools to support collaborative work, this paper presents an interview study aiming to understand (i) the motivations, (ii) how collaboration happens, and (iii) the challenges and barriers of collaborative software development. After interviewing twelve experienced software developers from GitHub, we found different types of collaborative contributions, such as in the management of requests for changes. Our analysis also indicates that the main barriers for collaboration are related to non-technical, rather than technical issues.