Biografia del relatore

U. Yeliz Eseryel is a Ph.D. student at Syracuse University School of Information Studies. After finishing her MBA and a Master's in Information Management from Syracuse University, Yeliz has worked as a consultant/project manager on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems implementations and U.S. Federal Government's Enterprise Architecture, e-government and IT capital planning projects. Her interest in Open Source Software related research focuses on coordination and knowledge-sharing among distributed teams as well as the impact of FLOSS movement on project management and team collaboration within the software development industry. Yeliz's other research interests include success factors for large scale IT projects, such as ERP's, with a focus on organizational change management and project management.

Abstract

We are studying the work practices of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) teams because they are prominent and interesting examples of distributed teams. Developers contribute from around the world, meet face-to-face infrequently if at all, and coordinate their activity primarily by means of computer-mediated communications (Raymond, 1998; Wayner, 2000). Characterized by a globally distributed developer force and a rapid and reliable software development process, effective FLOSS development teams somehow profit from the advantages and overcome the challenges of distributed work (Alho & Sulonen, 1998). Our overall project seeks to identify work practices that make some FLOSS teams more effective than others. In the exploratory study as of this paper, we compare several approaches for determining relationships among variables to suggest relevant practices for further study. In the following sections, we briefly discuss the available data, followed by the analysis techniques we tried and tentative conclusions.