In a bustling restaurant kitchen, efficiency requires more than just machines that wash dishes or chop vegetables. It requires a conductor to ensure the appetizer, main course, and dessert are prepared in the right sequence, that the right chef gets the right order, and that the correct dish reaches the right table on time.
The same dynamic applies to building software. When developers across the globe collaborate on open-source projects, writing the code is only half the battle. Coordinating the work is often the real bottleneck.
That coordination challenge sits at the center of new research co-authored by Alan (Ao) Huang, a third-year doctoral student at the University of Miami Patti and Allan Herbert Business School, alongside his advisors Ni Huang, professor and the Dennis and Smith Family Endowed Chair of Business Technology, and Yili Hong.
Published in Information Systems Research, the study examines how workflow automation speeds up innovation in open-source software (OSS) development and finds that the type of automation used matters just as much as the automation itself.
The researchers analyzed more than 4,500 repositories on GitHub, where developers collaborate on software projects, and 280,000 development issues. They found that workflow automation reduces issue resolution time by 10.1%, saving an average of 4.3 days per issue. At scale, the impact is significant.
