Large-scale software development requires coordination within and between very large engineering teams which may be located in different buildings, on different company campuses, and in different time zones. From a survey answered by 775 Microsoft software engineers, we learned how work was coordinated within and between teams and how engineers felt about their success at these tasks. The respondents revealed that the most common objects of coordination are schedules and features, not code or interfaces, and that more communication and personal contact worked better to make interactions between teams go more smoothly. 1.

Software teams often have trouble coordinating shared work due to poor communication practices. We surveyed software engineers (N=989) at Microsoft to investigate three rarely explored aspects of coordination: (1) how an engineer’s perception of dependence is predicted by his organizational characteristics, (2) how this perception differs when the dependence varies by the kinds of shared work artifacts, and (3) how the work group range affects the likelihood that an engineer will share information about work artifacts with another. Our results indicate that engineers tailor their communications about shared work for each group of intended recipients. This suggests that many existing coordination tools that rely on automatic mining and visualization of engineering activities have prevented senders from controlling the distribution of information about their work, and may have overestimated the receivers ’ abilities to comprehend it.

Development teams who work with others need to be aware of what everyone is doing in order to manage the risk of taking on dependencies. Using newsfeeds of software development activities mined from software repositories, teams can find relevant information to help them make well-informed decisions that affect the success of their endeavors. In this paper, we describe the architecture of a newsfeed system that we are currently building on top of the Codebook software repository mining platform. We discuss the design, construction and aggregation of newsfeeds, and include other important aspects such as summarization, filtering, context, and privacy. Categories and Subject Descriptors:

Collaboration in software development is a complex issue that has been examined by various researchers over the last decade. This paper presents a systematic literature review of pertinent literature on empirical studies on collaborative software development. We found that a lot of progress has been achieved in the field of global or distributed development. While there are still many challenges, today’s projects seem to have overcome at least some of those. Also, first steps have been made in understanding the collaborative aspects of requirements engineering and design. Research on tools for collaboration is advanced, having resulted in several successful tools especially in the area of communication. 1.

Abstract—Large-scale software engineering requires many teams to collaborate together to create software products. The problems these teams suffer trying to coordinate their joint work can be addressed through tools inspired by social networking. Social networking tools help people to more easily discover and more efficiently maintain relationships than is feasible using one-to-one or face-to-face interactions. Applying these ideas to the software domain requires new kinds and combinations of software program and process analyses that overcome intrinsic limitations in the accuracy of the underlying data sources and the ambiguity inherent in human relationships. Keywords-software process, human aspects I.