– Organizational social structures for software engineering DAMIAN A. TAMBURRI, VU University Amsterdam PATRICIA LAGO, VU University Amsterdam HANS VAN VLIET, VU University Amsterdam Software engineering evolved from a rigid process to a dynamic interplay of people (e.g. stakeholders or developers). Organizational and social literature call this interplay an organizational social structure (OSS). Software practitioners still lack a systematic way to select, analyze and support OSSs best fitting their problems (e.g. software development). We provide the state-of-the-art in OSSs, and discuss mechanisms to support OSS-related decisions in software engineering (e.g. choosing the OSS best fitting development scenarios). Our data supports two conclusions. First, software engineering focused on building software using project teams alone, yet these are one of thirteen OSS flavors from literature. Second, an emerging OSS should be further explored for software development: social networks. This article represents a first glimpse at OSS-aware software engineering, that is, to engineer software using OSSs best fit for the problem. Categories and Subject Descriptors: D2.9 [Software Engineering]: Management—Software process mod- els General Terms: Management, Human Factors Additional Key Words and Phrases: Organizational Social Structures, Social Context, Users, Cultural Im- plications, Social Adaptivity, User Perspective, Information Trust, Knowledge Management, Governance, Organizational Decision-Making, Software Organizations, Social Networks, Social Structures, Communi- ties, Software Practice ACM Reference Format: Tamburri, D.A., Lago, P., Van Vliet, H., 2012. Organizational Social Structures for Software Engineering. ACM Comput. Surv. -, -, Article – (October 2012), 33 pages. DOI = 10.1145/0000000.0000000 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/0000000.0000000 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1. Vision and Goals Social interaction has evolved as a consequence of globalization [Martinelli 2007]. The impact of this evolution is deep and spread to all aspects of society (infrastructure, ser- vices, etc.) [Langhorne 2001]. For example, dynamic and unpredictable global demands in businesses transformed single supply-chains into value-creating supply networks of corporate partnerships [Jetter et al. 2009]. Moreover, cloud computing rendered soft- ware and data increasingly pervasive, cheap and globally accessible [Armbrust et al. 2010; Kshetri 2010]. Previous research also suggests the keyword “social” is rapidly growing in interest for software engineering [Chard et al. 2010; Herbsleb and Mockus 2003]. Indeed, from a social perspective, software engineers, stakeholders, and end- users form an organizational social structure (OSS). Literature shows that quality support to developers’ OSS influences project success [Cataldo and Nambiar 2009a; Cataldo et al. 2009] and final product quality [Nagappan et al. 2008; Cataldo and Author’s addresses: VU University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1081a, The Netherlands. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies show this notice on the first page or initial screen of a display along with the full citation. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is per- mitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, to redistribute to lists, or to use any component of this work in other works requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Permissions may be requested from Publications Dept., ACM, Inc., 2 Penn Plaza, Suite 701, New York, NY 10121-0701 USA, fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. c  2012 ACM 0360-0300/2012/10-ART– $15.00 DOI 10.1145/0000000.0000000 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/0000000.0000000 ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. -, No. -, Article –, Publication date: October 2012.