Task dependencies drive the need to coordinate work activities. We describe a technique for using automatically generated archival data to compute coordination requirements, i.e., who must coordinate with whom to get the work done. Analysis of data from a large software development project revealed that coordination requirements were highly volatile, and frequently extended beyond team boundaries. Congruence between coordination requirements and coordination activities shortened development time. Developers, particularly the most productive ones, changed their use of electronic communication media over time, achieving higher congruence. We discuss practical implications of our technique for the design of collaborative and awareness tools. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.3 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Groups and Organization Interfaces – collaborative computing, computersupported

The identification and management of work dependencies is a fundamental challenge in software development organizations. This paper argues that modularization, the traditional technique intended to reduce interdependencies among components of a system, has serious limitations in the context of software development. We build on the idea of congruence, proposed in our prior work, to examine the relationship between the structure of technical and work dependencies and the impact of dependencies on software development productivity. Our empirical evaluation of the congruence framework showed that when developers’ coordination patterns are congruent with their coordination needs, the resolution time of modification requests was significantly reduced. Furthermore, our analysis highlights the importance of identifying the “right” set of technical dependencies that drive the coordination requirements among software developers. Call and data dependencies appear to have far less impact than logical dependencies. Categories and Subject Descriptors

The ability of an organization to successfully carry out its tasks depends on the appropriate combination of organizational structure, processes, and communication and coordination mechanisms. In this paper, we present four case studies that exemplify coordination breakdown problems in global software development. Our analysis showed those problems took place even in the presence of a collection of processes, organizational mechanisms and communication tools established to increases the ability of the teams to perform their tasks. Finally, we discuss possible solutions to overcome the identified problems. 1.

Over the past couple of decades, geographically distributed work has become pervasive and software development organizations are no exception. Factors such as access to talent, acquisitions and the need to reduce the time-to-market of new products

The success of software development projects depends on carefully and effectively coordinating the effort of many individuals across the multiple stages of the development process. In software engineering, modularization is the traditional technique intended to reduce the interdependencies among modules that constitute a system. Reducing technical dependencies, the theory argues, results in a reduction of work dependencies between teams developing interdependent modules. Organizational researchers have proposed similar theoretical arguments. Although such research streams have been quite influential, they have taken a coarse-grain and static view of the problem of coordination in engineering activities. This paper proposes a new perspective on coordination where fine-grain and evolving dependencies are front and central. Our empirical analyses demonstrate that considering dependencies at a fine-grain level of analysis provides us deeper insight to the relationship between technical and work dependencies. Moreover, our examination of two large scale projects from two distinct companies showed that (a) logical dependencies among software entities are significantly more important in terms of coordinating development work compared to syntactic dependencies and (b) satisfying coordination needs arising from those logical software dependencies with appropriate coordinating actions results in significant improvements on development productivity as well as a significant reduction in the failure proneness of the software systems. Keywords: metrics / measurement, productivity, organizational management and coordination, quality analysis and evaluation. 3 I.

In this paper, we develop a technique to measure how congruent the actual organizational communication channels are relative to the coordination requirement imposed by the dependencies among tasks. We examine the role of congruence in the context of a closed source project of a large distributed system. Our results show that congruence helped reduce resolution time of software modification requests. We also explore the evolution of congruence across several releases of the product. As task dependencies changed over time, we found that developers, in particular the most productive ones, change their patterns of usage of communication technologies such as Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and task-tracking systems. Finally, we discuss the practical implications of our technique for the design of collaborative and awareness tools. 1.

Interaction Value Analysis is a modeling methodology originally intended to illustrate how full connectivity between members of an organization affects the shape of the organization. Technology is already transforming workplaces into fully-connected networks by providing instant access, subject only to the availability of the communication participants, as well as perfect knowledge of the abilities and needs of other organization members. As IVA developed, it became clear that some elements of contingency theories developed to guide existing organizations were similar to the recommendations that IVA would give to a fully-connected organization. This meant that the phenomenon captured in the theory was not dependent on the absence or weakness of certain links between members. Lately, it has been possible to correlate financial performance of existing organizations to degree of adherence to IVA recommendations in certain types of organizations, namely those that display low uncertainty. This makes it interesting to seek a modified IVA formulation that relaxes the assumption of perfect knowledge. Doing so would allow IVA to demonstrate that it can replicate and hence simplify the explanation of phenomena noted in the Contingency Theory literature concerning organizations that face uncertainty in their environments.

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