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

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.

REFERENCES

• 1: Allen, T. J. 1977. Managing the Flow of Technology. MIT Press.
• 2: Carliss Y. Baldwin , Kim B. Clark, Design Rules: The Power of Modularity Volume 1, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999
• 3: Victoria Bellotti , Nicolas Ducheneaut , Mark Howard , Ian Smith, Taking email to task: the design and evaluation of a task management centered email tool, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, April 05-10, 2003, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA [doi>10.1145/642611.642672]
• 4: Matthew Bass , Vesna Mikulovic , Len Bass , James Herbsleb , Marcelo Cataldo, Architectural Misalignment: An Experience Report, Proceedings of the Sixth Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture, p.17, January 06-09, 2007 [doi>10.1109/WICSA.2007.12]
• 5: Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., The mythical man-month (anniversary ed.), Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1995
• 6: Burton, R. M. and Obel, B. 1998. Strategic Organizational Diagnosis and Design. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell, MA.
• 7: J. J. Cadiz , Gina Venolia , Gavin Jancke , Anoop Gupta, Designing and deploying an information awareness interface, Proceedings of the 2002 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, November 16-20, 2002, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA [doi>10.1145/587078.587122]
• 8: Carley, K. M. 2002. Smart Agents and Organizations of the Future. In Handbook of New Media. Edited by Lievrouw, L. and Livingstone, S., Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA.
• 9: Carley, K. M and Ren, Y. Tradeoffs between Performance and Adaptability for C³I Architectures. 2001. In Proceedings of the 6th International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium, Annapolis, Maryland.
• 10: Marcelo Cataldo , Patrick A. Wagstrom , James D. Herbsleb , Kathleen M. Carley, Identification of coordination requirements: implications for the Design of collaboration and awareness tools, Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work, November 04-08, 2006, Banff, Alberta, Canada [doi>10.1145/1180875.1180929]
• 11: Marcelo Cataldo , Matthew Bass , James D. Herbsleb , Len Bass, On Coordination Mechanisms in Global Software Development, Proceedings of the International Conference on Global Software Engineering, p.71-80, August 27-30, 2007 [doi>10.1109/ICGSE.2007.33]
• 12: Paul Clements , David Garlan , Len Bass , Judith Stafford , Robert Nord , James Ivers , Reed Little, Documenting Software Architectures: Views and Beyond, Pearson Education, 2002
• 13: Conway, M. E. 1968. How do committees invent? Datamation, 14, 5, 28--31.
• 14: Bill Curtis, Tutorial, Human Factors in Software Development, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, 1990
• 15: Bill Curtis , Herb Krasner , Neil Iscoe, A field study of the software design process for large systems, Communications of the ACM, v.31 n.11, p.1268-1287, Nov. 1988 [doi>10.1145/50087.50089]
• 16: Cleidson Ronald Botelho De Souza , David F. Redmiles, On the relationship between software dependencies and coordination: field studies and tool support, California State University at Long Beach, Long Beach, CA, 2005
• 17: Cleidson R. B. de Souza , David Redmiles , Li-Te Cheng , David Millen , John Patterson, How a good software practice thwarts collaboration: the multiple roles of APIs in software development, Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGSOFT twelfth international symposium on Foundations of software engineering, October 31-November 06, 2004, Newport Beach, CA, USA
• 18: Eclipse Project. 2008. http://www.eclipse.org. URL accessed on February 28th, 2008.
• 19: Eppinger, S. D., Whitney, D. E., Smith, R. P. and Gebala, D. A. 1994. A Model-Based Method for Organizing Tasks in Product Development. Research in Engineering Design, 6, 1--13.
• 20: J. Alberto Espinosa , Robert E. Kraut, Shared mental models and coordination in large-scale, distributed software development, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 2002
• 21: Danyel Fisher , A. J. Brush , Eric Gleave , Marc A. Smith, Revisiting Whittaker & Sidner's "email overload" ten years later, Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work, November 04-08, 2006, Banff, Alberta, Canada [doi>10.1145/1180875.1180922]
• 22: Harald Gall , Karin Hajek , Mehdi Jazayeri, Detection of Logical Coupling Based on Product Release History, Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance, p.190, March 16-19, 1998
• 23: Alessandro Garcia , Elisa Baniassad , Cristina Videira Lopes , Christa Schwanninger , Jianjun Zhao, 1st Workshop on Assessment of Contemporary Modularization Techniques (ACoM.07), Companion to the proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering, p.144-145, May 20-26, 2007 [doi>10.1109/ICSECOMPANION.2007.1]
• 24: Werner Geyer , Beth Brownholtz , Michael Muller , Casey Dugan , Eric Wilcox , David R. Millen, Malibu personal productivity assistant, CHI '07 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, April 28-May 03, 2007, San Jose, CA, USA [doi>10.1145/1240866.1241010]
• 25: Rebecca E. Grinter , James D. Herbsleb , Dewayne E. Perry, The geography of coordination: dealing with distance in R&D work, Proceedings of the international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work, p.306-315, November 14-17, 1999, Phoenix, Arizona, United States [doi>10.1145/320297.320333]
• 26: Hassan, A. E. and Holt, R. C. 2004. C-REX: An Evolutionary Code Extractor for C. CSER Meeting. Canada, 2004
• 27: Henderson, R. M. and Clarck, K. B. 1990. Architectural Innovation: The Reconfiguration of Existing Product Technologies and the Failure of Established Firms. Administrative Science Quarterly, 35, 9--30.
• 28: James D. Herbsleb , Audris Mockus, An Empirical Study of Speed and Communication in Globally Distributed Software Development, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.29 n.6, p.481-494, June 2003 [doi>10.1109/TSE.2003.1205177]
• 29: Herbsleb, J. D., Mockus, A. and Roberts, J. A. 2006. Collaboration in Software Engineering Projects: A Theory of Coordination. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems (Milwaukee, Wisconsin). ICIS'06.
• 30: Susan Horwitz , Thomas Reps , David Binkley, Interprocedural slicing using dependence graphs, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), v.12 n.1, p.26-60, Jan. 1990 [doi>10.1145/77606.77608]
• 31: David H. Hutchens , Victor R. Basili, System Structure Analysis: Clustering with Data Bindings, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.11 n.8, p.749-757, August 1985 [doi>10.1109/TSE.1985.232524]
• 32: Jazz Project. 2008. http://jazz.net/pub/index.jsp. URL accessed on February 28th, 2008.
• 33: Krackhardt, D. and Carley, K. M. 1998. A PCANS Model of Structure in Organization. In Proceedings of the 1998 International Symposium on Command and Control Research and Technology, 113--119.
• 34: Robert E. Kraut , Lynn A. Streeter, Coordination in software development, Communications of the ACM, v.38 n.3, p.69-81, March 1995 [doi>10.1145/203330.203345]
• 35: Dean Leffingwell , Don Widrig, Managing Software Requirements: A Use Case Approach, Pearson Education, 2003
• 36: Levchuk, G. M. et al. 2004. Normative Design of Project-Based Organizations - Part III: Modeling Congruent, Robust and Adaptive Organizations. IEEE Trans. on Systems, Man & Cybernetics, 34, 3, 337--350.
• 37: Gail C. Murphy , David Notkin , William G. Griswold , Erica S. Lan, An empirical study of static call graph extractors, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), v.7 n.2, p.158-191, April 1998 [doi>10.1145/279310.279314]
• 38: Gary M. Olson , Judith S. Olson, Distance matters, Human-Computer Interaction, v.15 n.2, p.139-178, September 2000 [doi>10.1207/S15327051HCI1523_4]
• 39: D. L. Parnas, On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules, Communications of the ACM, v.15 n.12, p.1053-1058, Dec. 1972 [doi>10.1145/361598.361623]
• 40: Richard W. Selby , Victor R. Basili, Analyzing Error-Prone System Structure, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.17 n.2, p.141-152, February 1991 [doi>10.1109/32.67595]
• 41: Simon, H. A. (1962). The Architecture of Complexity. In Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 106, 6, 467--482.
• 42: Manuel E. Sosa , Steven D. Eppinger , Craig M. Rowles, The Misalignment of Product Architecture and Organizational Structure in Complex Product Development, Management Science, v.50 n.12, p.1674-1689, December 2004 [doi>10.1287/mnsc.1040.0289]
• 43: Kevin J. Sullivan , William G. Griswold , Yuanfang Cai , Ben Hallen, The structure and value of modularity in software design, Proceedings of the 8th European software engineering conference held jointly with 9th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering, September 10-14, 2001, Vienna, Austria
• 44: Von Hippel, E. (1990). Task Partitioning: An Innovation Process Variable. Research Policy, 19, 407--418.
• 45: Martin Wattenberg , Steven L. Rohall , Daniel Gruen , Bernard Kerr, E-mail research: targeting the enterprise, Human-Computer Interaction, v.20 n.1, p.139-162, June 2005 [doi>10.1207/s15327051hci2001&2_5]
• 46: Yassine, A., Joglekar, N., Braha, D., Eppinger, S. And Whitney, D. 2003. Information Hiding in Product Development: The Design Churn Effect. Research in Engineering Design, 14, 145--161.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.9 Management
          Subjects: Productivity

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.9 Management
          Subjects: Programming teams

  K. Computing Milieux
  K.6 MANAGEMENT OF COMPUTING AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS
      K.6.1 Project and People Management
          Subjects: Systems development

General Terms:
Human Factors, Management, Measurement

Keywords:
collaborative software development, coordination, software dependencies