The preferable ways of decision-making in IT teams

Abstract

Software development team collaboration requires various decisions regarding essential aspects of a project’s progress. General and particular decision-making models are considered, and their main aspects such as team types, problem solving categories, and decision-making ways are analysed. The research concerns representative groups of IT specialists and their preferences in decision-making are investigated. Four possible cases were tested: hierarchical choice (by leader) team members' choice (team consensus or voting) and external expert impact. It allows one to show some differences in behaviors of traditional and virtual teams.

How are decisions made in open source software communities? — Uncovering rationale from python email repositories

“…Decisions are based on the collective community view. There are various ways to establish this view, Mr owka 18 and Krawczyk-Bryłka and Krawczyk 33 which are based on different circumstances and they are summarized in Table 2. Some sort of informal voting is generally used to source each member's preference.…”

“…As indicated earlier, this corresponds to the decision‐scheme (the method) that is used to make decisions. Based on key literature on decision‐schemes, 18,32,33 we have identified five main schemes as summarized in Table 1. While all five schemes enable decisions to be made in a group setting, the first three involve the participation of several members in a community, and the last two delegate the responsibility of the final decision to select individuals.…”

“…While prior works 18,[32][33][34] have identified some of the decision-schemes (in Table 1) and rationale (in Table 2), these were identified by reading project web pages and blogs, and surveying and interviewing project members. However, there are two main issues with these extant works.…”