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

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.

We introduce a new method for determining work dependencies that are antecedents to coordination requirements among members of a software development organization. Our method leverages records of individual activity associated with development tasks, sometimes called task context, which can be collected by monitoring the actions carried out by a developer during work sessions within her development environment. We describe an algorithm that measures similarity between task contexts and produces a measure of closeness between the corresponding developers. By means of a field study on an open source project that routinely records task context data, we show how the closeness relationship accurately determines the same coordination requirements detected using traditional methods. Our method also provides a temporal advantage, since it uses “live” instead of historical data. We explain how these findings make coordination requirements actionable for management-, designand team-related decisions as the development work is underway. This moves research in this area from post-mortem analysis to proactive detection of coordination requirements.

An important dimension of success in development projects is the quality of the new product. Researchers have primarily concentrated on developing and evaluating processes to reduce errors and mistakes and, consequently, achieve higher levels of quality. However, little attention has been given to other factors that have a significant impact on enabling development organizations carry the numerous development activities with minimal errors. In this paper, we examined the relative role of multiple sources of errors such as experience, geographic distribution, technical properties of the product and projects ’ time pressure. Our empirical analyses of 209 development projects showed that all four categories of sources of errors are quite relevant. We discussed those results in terms of their implications for improving collaborative tools to support distributed development projects.

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Abstract—Global Software Development (GSD) projects are passing through different boundaries of a company, country and even in other continents where time zone differs between both sites. Beside many benefits of such development, research declared plenty of negative impacts on these GSD projects. It is important to understand problems which may lie during the execution of GSD project with different time zones. This research project discussed and provided different issues related to time delays in GSD projects. In this paper, authors investigated some of the time delay factors which usually lie in GSD projects with different time zones. This investigation is done through systematic review of literature. Furthermore, the practices to overcome these delay factors which have already been reported in literature and GSD organizations are also explored through literature survey and case studies.