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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

Abstract—Prior research has shown that customer-reported software faults are often the result of violated dependencies that are not recognized by developers implementing software. Many types of dependencies and corresponding measures have been proposed to help address this problem. The objective of this research is to compare the relative performance of several of these dependency measures as they relate to customer-reported defects. Our analysis is based on data collected from two projects from two independent companies. Combined, our data set encompasses eight years of development activity involving 154 developers. The principal contribution of this study is the examination of the relative impact that syntactic, logical, and work dependencies have on the failure proneness of a software system. While all dependencies increase the fault proneness, the logical dependencies explained most of the variance in fault proneness, while workflow dependencies had more impact than syntactic dependencies. These results suggest that practices such as rearchitecting, guided by the network structure of logical dependencies, hold promise for reducing defects. Index Terms—Distribution/maintenance/enhancement, metrics/measurement, organizational management and coordination, quality analysis and evaluation. Ç 1

. Mobility is a mechanism to manage accessibility dependencies amongst agents. As such, it is a coordination mechanism in the interaction of agents, users, and information. The Linda-like coordination language Mobile Object Spaces is used to express coordination of entities. It supports the basic operations for coordination by mobility as primitives. Higher order coordination structures can be captured as coordination patterns that describe reoccuring building blocks. We present a template for the description of such patterns and describe some very simple coordination patterns in the area of mobility and information systems. 1 Introduction Coordination is a phenomenon which pervades our daily life and work. If we are well organized, coordination is invisible and only its absence reveals the necessity for coordinative action. Uncoordinated situations lead to noticeable chaos and to failures of work. Coordination is embodied in human interaction, such as in a discussion where...

Abstract. While software is becoming decomposed in more and more finegrained entities, the interactions amongst those become of major importance. While methodologies for building such components are well established, the design and support of their interplay can not build on commonly understood and well defined models. In this paper, we review several coordination models from various disciplines, and describe how a coordination reference model could look like. We use a set of characteristics of coordination models to compare the reviewed ones. 1 Looking at Models of Coordination Todays software is structured into modules, objects, components, agents etc. These entities try to capture rather small conceptual abstractions and supports it with functionality. While this is advantageous for the design and implementation of software, networked environments add additional benefits when running programs composed from those entities. Given a good encapsulation, they can be distributed or mobile, and different non-functional characteristics such as fault-tolerant or persistence can be attributed to them.

a handbook of organizational processes

Coordination is a crucial problem in CE systems and it is neither easy to obtain nor to maintain. Our work is an attempt to develop a general model for coordination which can be adapted for some situations in the context of CE. For this purpose, the coordination definition developed by Malone [25] has been adopted. Coordination is then de#ned as the process of managing dependencies between activities. In this context, a theoretical model is presented that allows one to determine how to model an agent's activities and how to detect dependencies between those activities. In our model, major concepts are developed in terms of components of coordination, situations of coordination, coordination mechanisms and the coordination process. In this paper, we detail this model and then, we present an illustrative example and finally, we identify the current status and the future evolution of our approach.

Current mechanisms for the description of Web Services and their composition are either to coarse -- by specifying a functional interface only -- or too fine -- by specifying a concrete control flow amongst services.

This paper examines the management by equipment suppliers of consistency between their product development efforts and the evolution of public standards. We specify structures which make explicit the role of a firm's standards management and provide a unified perspective of its interdependences with other groups, internal and external to the firm. Based on a sample of cases provided by nine standards managers in three firms we develop five standards management structures which are used to provide consistency between product development and public standards evolution. We also show how these structures can be changed systematically with changes in goals and how they are related to three basic building blocks which we refer to as Information Management, Commercial Exploitation and Standard Development. The paper makes two main contributions. First, it enables individuals involved in the design or implementation of a standards strategy to create a simple and realistic visual representation of the binding which channels their activities. Second, it provides a stable framework within which

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