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

Version control branching allows an organization to parallelize its development efforts. Releasing a software system developed in this manner requires release managers, and other project stakeholders, to make decisions about how to integrate the branched work. This group decision-making process becomes very complex in the case of large-scale parallel development. To better understand the information needs of release managers in this context, we conducted an interview study at a large software company. Our analysis of the interviews provides a view into how release managers make integration decisions, organized around ten key factors. Based on these factors, we discuss specific information needs for release managers and how the needs can be met in future work.