When organizations outsource software development, a rapid increase in the use of new developers is likely. This can reduce productivity and cause delays. In this paper, Zhou and Mockus address the topic of “developer fluency” and related factors. Fluency is defined as “the ability to complete project tasks rapidly and accurately, independent of task difficulty or importance.” The related factors that they consider are productivity, task difficulty, and task centrality. Productivity equals the tasks completed per month, and task centrality is considered with respect to the dimensions of “customer, system-wide, team, and future impact.” The strengths of the paper are its use of metrics and modeling, and the identification of seven hypotheses to interpret the results.

Following a careful introduction that sets the stage for the substance of the paper is a review of related work from the literature. The third section presents the methodology that the authors followed, which includes the attributes of ten projects studied, the interview approach, the data filtering, and the modeling approach. The fourth section presents the major results in detail, with findings about the nature of fluency, quantifying fluency, and the insights that resulted. The authors present the insights as seven hypotheses. One is worth a special mention: “Developers do not become fluent for at least three years in large projects.” The paper ends with a discussion of limitations and future directions.

Researchers with an interest in outsourcing, offshoring, or software developer effectiveness should be interested in the work of Zhou and Mockus.