Sustaining large open source development efforts requires recruiting new participants; however, a lack of architectural documentation might inhibit new participants since large amounts of project knowledge are unavailable to newcomers. We present the results of a multitrait, multimethod analysis of the effects of introducing architectural documentation into a substantial open source project-the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). HDFS had only minimal architectural documentation, and we wanted to discover whether the putative benefits of architectural documentation could be observed over time. To do this, we created and publicized an architecture document and then monitored its usage and effects on the project. The results were somewhat ambiguous: by some measures the architecture documentation appeared to effect the project but not by others. Perhaps of equal importance is our discovery that the project maintained, in its Web-accessible JIRA archive of software issues and fixes, enough architectural discussion to support architectural thinking and reasoning. This “emergent” architecture documentation served an important purpose in recording core project members' architectural concerns and resolutions. However, this emergent architecture documentation did not serve all project members equally well; it appears that those on the periphery of the project-newcomers and adopters-still require explicit architecture documentation, as we will show.

Measurement programs in software organizations are an important source of control over quality and cost in software development. The findings of this research presented here are based on an industry-wide survey conducted to examine the factors that influence success in software metrics programs. Our approach is to go beyond the anecdotal information on metrics programs that exists in the literature and use the industry-wide survey data to rigorously test for the effects of various factors that affect metrics programs success. We measure success in metrics programs using two variables-use of metrics information in decision-making and improved organizational performance. The various determinants of metrics program success are divided into two sets-organizational variables and technical variables. The influence of these variables on metrics programs success is tested using regression analysis. Our results support some of the factors discussed in the anecdotal literature such as management support, goal alignment, and communication and feedback. Certain other factors such as metrics quality and the ease of data collection are not as strongly influential on success. We conclude the paper with a detailed discussion of our results and suggestions for future work.

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