Communication is an important activity within software engineering teams as within any other type of organization. In distributed setting, distance has been reported to introduce significant delay in communication. However, new processes and tools have been specifically introduced to alleviate the effect of distance on distributed development. In order to examine if the new processes and tools have indeed made a different on distributed development, we conduct an empirical study in communication of a large globally distributed software engineering team. The goals of our study are to a) investigate the effects of distance on communication speed and b) examine the structure of communication network of this team. We found that distribution does not affect communication speed as reported in previous studies. We also found that this team was able to maintain a project wide communication network with a large core of contributors from across different sites. We conjectured that this structure of communication network helps teams to overcome the challenges of distribution. Finally, we explain the implications of our findings to practitioners and suggest directions for future studies.

Orientador: Mario Jino, Plinio de Sa Leitão Junior / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Eletrica e de Computação / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-15T03:59:29Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Cabeca_AndreaGoncalves_M.pdf: 8778522 bytes, checksum: c968246a4fb6a8fb41b47192a1d8cb15 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009 / Resumo: O teste de aplicações de banco de dados é crucial para assegurar a alta qualidade do software, pois defeitos não detectados podem resultar em corrupção irrecuperável dos dados. SQL é a mais amplamente utilizada interface para sistemas de banco de dados. Nossa abordagem visa a alcançar testes efetivos pela seleção de bases de dados reveladoras de defeitos. Usamos a análise de mutantes em comandos SQL e discutimos dois cenários para aplicar as técnicas de mutação forte e fraca. Uma ferramenta para auxiliar na automatização da técnica foi desenvolvida e implementada. Experimentos usando aplicações reais, defeitos reais e dados reais foram conduzidos para: (i) avaliar a aplicabilidade da abordagem; e (ii) comparar bases de dados de entrada quanto à habilidade para detectar defeitos / Abstract: Testing database applications is crucial for ensuring high quality software as undetected faults can result in unrecoverable data corruption. SQL is the most widely used interface language for relational database systems. Our approach aims to achieve better tests by selecting fault-revealing databases. We use mutation analysis on SQL statements and discuss two scenarios for applying strong and weak mutation techniques. A tool to support the automatization of the technique has been developed and implemented. Experiments using real applications, real faults and real data were performed to: (i) evaluate the applicability of the approach, and (ii) compare fault-revealing abilities of input databases / Mestrado / Engenharia de Computação / Mestre em Engenharia Elétrica