Trust is a factor that dramatically contributes to the success or failure of distributed software teams. We present a research model showing that social communication between distant developers enables the affective appraisal of trustworthiness even from a distance, thus increasing project performance. To overcome the limitations of self-reported data, typically questionnaires, we focus on software projects following a pull request-based development model and approximate the overall performance of a software project with the history of successful collaborations occurring between developers.
@article{arxiv.1709.03777,
title = {Establishing Personal Trust-based Connections in Distributed Teams},
author = {Fabio Calefato and Filippo Lanubile},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.03777},
year = {2017}
}