Understanding and improving software build teams

Abstract

Build, creating software from source code, is a fundamental activity in software development. Build teams manage this process and ensure builds are produced reliably and efficiently. This paper presents an exploration into the nature of build teams--how they form, work, and relate to other teams--through three multi-method studies conducted at Microsoft. We also consider build team effectiveness and find that many challenges are social, not technical: role ambiguity, knowledge sharing, communication, trust, and conflict. Our findings validate theories from group dynamics and organization science, and using a cross-discipline approach, we apply learnings from these fields to inform the design of engineering tools and practices to improve build team effectiveness