The Transactive Processes of Social Coding: How Code Review Substitutes for Transactive Memory in Software Development Teams

Social coding refers to a modern and technology-mediated way of peer code review between software developers. Whereas social coding has a long tradition in open source communities, it is only recently becoming popular in co-located, agile information systems development teams. Although social coding constitutes an important mechanisms of quality assurance and organizational learning in open source, little is known about its effects on co-located and ongoing professional software development teams. We close this gap by examining the question of how and why social coding affects professional development teams’ work outcome and transactive memory. Results from our questionnaire-based survey with 61 development teams of more than 300 developers, team leads, and product managers, suggest that social coding not only improves teams’ software quality directly but can also partially substitute for their transactive memory system. This has implications for theory on software development and transactive memory