Apel, SvenTichy, MatthiasBodden, EricKuhrmann, MarcoWagner, StefanSteghöfer, Jan-Philipp2019-03-292019-03-292018978-3-88579-673-2https://dl.gi.de/handle/20.500.12116/21171The role of the organizational structure of large-scale, distributed software projects and its relation to project success has been gaining considerable attention in the research and practice of software engineering. Research has shown that analyzing the organizational structure reveals a great extent of information relevant for project evolution and success, including quality, productivity, and delays. However, despite encouraging results, the knowledge on which organizational patterns are desirable and how we can elicit and improve them is often anecdotal, and implications thereof are transferred only rarely systematically. In this talk, I will report on our ongoing endeavor of studying real-world software projects to provide deep insights into the nature and role of organizational structure for understanding and ensuring project success as well as to drive the development and evaluation of efficient software-engineering practices and tools. In the long run, we aim at answering a number of scientifically and practically relevant research questions, including how we can extract accurate information on a project's organizational structure, which organizational patterns arise in practice, how they vary over time, and how they relate to project success. Methodologically, we base our research on a rigorous network approach, which includes a representation of organizational structures, called a developer network, as well as a state-of-the-art network-analysis framework.enText/Conference Paper1617-5468