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The collaborative effort of software developers around the world produces Open Source Software (OSS) products, and most importantly, the source code of the software product is shared publicly. A recent survey of 1300 IT professionals by Black Duck Software showed that the percentage of companies using open source software grew from 42% to 78% between 2010 and 2015. There has been a significant increase in the formation of self-organizing virtual teams to produce open source software products and services. The current literature does not address the factors affecting the success of open source projects through the lens of self-organizing virtual teams and the sentiment among the developers and the sentiment among software developers. This phenomenon suggests a need to understand how successful project teams are created in a virtual collaborative environment. This research investigates how successful virtual teams are formed through the influence of an online developer community. The focus of this research is to assess how the online developer community, Stack Overflow (SO), influences the success of open source projects. More precisely, the study empirically tests the influence of the SO community on successful Github (GH) projects. The investigation also empirically examines how the ties among the software developers in the SO community initiate the self-creation of OSS project teams. The research also explores the perception of the developers about open source projects. Furthermore, the study probes the impact of OSS artifacts, namely “feature” and “patch” requests, on open source projects. The findings indicate that the perception of the developers in the SO community, prior ties among the developers in the community, and the artifact type of the project are the factors that influence the success of OSS projects. The research discusses the implications of the outcomes concerning self-organizing open source project teams.

Risk—the possibility of an unsatisfactory outcome—is an essential vehicle for a software development project to progress. The risk in itself is neutral; it is essential to progress, and failure is often a key part of learning. However, we must learn to balance the possible negative consequences of risk against the potential benefits of its associated opportunity. Risk management has traditionally been an integral part of software development. The change from traditional software development process models, such as the waterfall model, to agile methods, has created new challenges in the field of risk management. This thesis discusses how risks act as a mechanism in self-organizing agile software development teams. We report our analysis from the students’ agile teams and have found that the risk management strategies adopted by our students were inherently collaborative. We further leveraged this collaborative activity to execute instructor interventions. In addition to this, our study also reports that besides being collaborative, the students’ teams are lean. Moreover, we reported our observation from Ganga software development team (A High Energy Physics Application) and have found that their risk management follows some of the similar trends that our students’ agile teams do.