The Communicational Side of Open Source Communities

Communication is a fundamental value of software development teams, especially in Open Source(OP) communities, in fact, is a quite complex network of individuals having different roles and responsibilities, who can be looked upon as volunteers who spend their time creating and improving software. These people taking part in OS Software development use to share knowledge among themselves, exchange information and creative a collaborative environment. To coordinate and improve communication of these teams dis-located all over the world and use to work at different times and ways, it is necessary to predispose and utilize specific tools. This research study was born with the proposal to individuate and evaluate communication among members of OS communities analysing different development teams. The starting point is an academic software development project: Metodologie Agili Distribuite (Agile Distribuite Metodologies, MAD) project. This case study, performed at University of Cagliari, was made up of two well defined software development phases. The first one performed within an almost pure XP co-located environment, the second one involving a 20-programmers distributed team. The main goal of this experience was to show how a pure XP approach evolves while passing from a co-located to a distribute team.