Transfer of Code Ownership, Implicit Teams, and Organizational Tomography

Transfer of code ownership or succession is a crucial ingredient in open source projects because the source code tends to be reused and in global software development because products are offshored or outsourced. Measuring and studying such transfer can highlight the way organizations adapt to new product structure and change the received product in response. We evaluate several measures of succession on a sample of developers whose tasks were transferred. The best fitting measures were then used to discover the most likely relationships for multiple development locations. To illustrate some of the powerful implications we propose productivity ratio to measure the decrease in productivity associated with the succession and quantify it for instances of withinand across-location succession. Decrease in productivity ratio almost doubles when comparing across-location to within-location successions.