research-article

Socio-technical congruence: a framework for assessing the impact of technical and work dependencies on software development productivity

Authors:

Marcelo Cataldo,

James D. Herbsleb,

Kathleen M. CarleyAuthors Info & Claims

ESEM '08: Proceedings of the Second ACM-IEEE international symposium on Empirical software engineering and measurement

Pages 2 - 11

https://doi.org/10.1145/1414004.1414008

Published: 09 October 2008 Publication History

Abstract

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.

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Index Terms

Socio-technical congruence: a framework for assessing the impact of technical and work dependencies on software development productivity
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Management of computing and information systems
      1. Project and people management
        Systems development
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Collaboration in software development
      1. Programming teams

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cover image ACM Conferences

ESEM '08: Proceedings of the Second ACM-IEEE international symposium on Empirical software engineering and measurement

October 2008

374 pages

ISBN:9781595939715

DOI:10.1145/1414004

General Chair:
Dieter Rombach
University of Kaiserslautern and Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (Germany)
,
Program Chairs:
Sebastian Elbaum
University of Nebraska-Lincoln (USA)
,
Jürgen Münch
Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (Germany)

Copyright © 2008 ACM.

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Published: 09 October 2008

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