Coordination by reassignment in the Firefox Community

According to the so-called “mirroring hypothesis”, the structure of an organization tends to replicate the technical dependencies among the different components in the product (or service) that the organization is developing. An explanation for this phenomenon is that socio-technical alignment, which can be measured by the congruence of technical dependencies and human relations (Cataldo et al., 2008), leads to more efficient coordination. In this context, we suggest that a key organizational capability, especially in fast-changing environments, is to quickly reorganize in response to new opportunities or simply in order to solve problems more efficiently. To back up our suggestion, we study the dynamics of congruence between task dependencies and expert attention within the Firefox project, as reported to the Bugzilla bug tracking system. We identify in this database several networks of interrelated problems, known as “bug report networks” (Sandusky et al., 2004). We show that the ability to reassign bugs to other developers within each bug report network does indeed correlate positively with the average level of congruence achieved on each bug report network. Furthermore, when bug report networks are grouped according to common experts, we find preliminary evidence that the relationship between congruence and assignments could be different from one group to the other.