Implicit coordination in open development environments

We conducted a case study of a popular OSS GitHub-hosted project, Rails. In a mixed-method research approach, we surveyed 986 developers, interviewed 14 developers and conducted a repository analysis. We investigated two GitHub features that support implicit coordination —issue subscriptions and following relationships. The findings from our study indicate that both of these features are widely adopted by OSS users. There are various reasons why users choose to use these features. The main reason for subscribing to issues is to obtain information on dependencies, a form of implicit coordination. Survey respondents believed that subscribing to issues reduced their direct communication. However, many of our interviewees and survey respondents indicated that notifications from following others introduced too much noise and, therefore, were not useful. Our future work will include studies of implicit coordination in other modern development environments like SourceForge, Jazz or Bitbucket. These studies will allow us to develop a more general understanding of implicit coordination and the features that support it.