Learning in offshore and legacy software projects: How product structure shapes organization

We investigate how an organizational structure and culture are affected by legacy products and, in particular, if an inverse Conway’s law holds: “Developer culture for a legacy product mirrors the culture of organizations that created and maintained that product in the past.” We study three large products that were offshored and the entire development team has been replaced with an offshore team, and a very large legacy product that faced the large-scale departure of its core developers. Using legitimate peripheral participation approach we describe the learning process in these diverse circumstances and find that a) The legacy product structure involves not just modules and cross-cutting concerns, but also information retrieval strategies and other activity structure; b) Product structure has a dramatic effect on the organization when the entire team is reconstituted from scratch in another location (learning reproduces organization through product structure.) c) The accessibility of resources provided by projects, and the access practices implemented by developers, affect developers’ learning. d) Developers learn through practice and over time, and in larger projects it takes longer to reach productivity plateau. We expect our findings could be used to improve developer project joining process by describing the key activities that need to be mastered by an offshore developer and problems that are facing them. The findings also suggest that software organizations maintaining legacy products are less likely to be able to adjust to changing competitive business environment and might need to create a cultural firewall between parts of the organization engaged in new and legacy products.