Coordination Breakdowns and Their Impact on Development Productivity and Software Failures

Abstract

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.

From Developer Networks to Verified Communities: A Fine-Grained Approach

“…Cataldo et al examined the important concept of sociotechnical congruence and its impact on development productivity and software quality [8], [7]. Based on knowledge of work dependencies and technical dependencies, they identified coordination requirements.…”

“…Software developers are required to coordinate their efforts to manage sub-component dependencies and to reconcile the software's sub-components into a functional whole. Failure in the software to meet expectations is often the consequence of insufficient coordination between developers [7], [16], [9], [12].…”

“…Recent empirical research has demonstrated the significant influence of developer organization on software quality [7], [31], [27], [28]. It even suggests that evaluation methods that are entirely based on organizational properties are more indicative of fault proneness than traditional source-code-centric metrics [28].…”

When shared cognition leads to closed minds: Temporal mental models, team learning, adaptation and performance

“…With a temporal mental model, team members are able to time and synchronize their actions and activities, and to be aware about the time they have for learning behaviors in order to not interfere with other aspects of task execution (Bunderson & Sutcliffe, 2003;March, 1991 (Cataldo & Herbsleb, 2013 (Kulik & Kulik, 1988).…”

A mechanism to assess the relationship between socio-technical congruence and project performance in incremental model

“…The modularization theories state that when technical interdependencies lessen within the module, then communication requirement within team members also lessen [37]. Hence, this will lead to increasing of integration issue with regard to the communication problem [38]. Customarily, technical information is shared through several ways such as forum, email and instant message among central and remote team in order to spread the knowledge [24].…”