Take a look at the new version of this page: [ beta version ]. Tell us what you think.

ABSTRACT

Task dependencies drive the need to coordinate work activities. We describe a technique for using automatically generated archi-val 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 coordina-tion requirements were highly volatile, and frequently extended beyond team boundaries. Congruence between coordination re-quirements 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.

REFERENCES

• 1: Allen, T.J. Managing the Flow of Technology. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1977.
• 2: 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]
• 3: Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., The mythical man-month (anniversary ed.), Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1995
• 4: Burton, R.M. and Obel, B. Strategic Organizational Diagno-sis and Design. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell, MA, 1998.
• 5: Carley, K.M and Ren, Y. Tradeoffs between Performance and Adaptability for C3I Architectures. In Proceedings of the 6th International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium, Annapolis, Maryland, 2001.
• 6: Kevin Ghen Crowston , Thomas W. Malone, Towards a coordination cookbook: recipes for multi-agent action, 1991
• 7: Curtis, B. et al. Software psychology: the need for interdisci-plinary program. In Proceedings of the IEEE, 74, 8 (Aug. 1986), 1092-1106.
• 8: 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]
• 9: Daft, R.L. and Weick, K.E. Towards a model of organiza-tions as interpretation systems. Academy of Management Review, 9, 2 (Apr. 1984), 284--295.
• 10: J. Alberto Espinosa , Robert E. Kraut, Shared mental models and coordination in large-scale, distributed software development, 2002
• 11: Fisher, D., Hogan, B., Brush, A.J., Smith, M, Jacobs, A. Using social sorting to enhance email management. Human-Computer Interaction Consortium (HCIC '06), Fraser, Colorado, 2006.
• 12: Jay R. Galbraith, Designing Complex Organizations, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1973
• 13: Gruen, D. et al. (2004). Lessons from the ReMail prototype. In Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems (CHI '04), Viena, Austria, 2004, 152--161.
• 14: Mark Handel , James D. Herbsleb, What is chat doing in the workplace?, Proceedings of the 2002 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, November 16-20, 2002, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA [doi>10.1145/587078.587080]
• 15: Henderson, R.M. and Clark, K.B. Architectural innovation: the reconfiguration of existing product technologies and the failure of established firms. Administrative Science Quarterly, 35, 1 (Mar. 1990), 9--30.
• 16: Herbsleb, J.D. and Mockus, A. An Empirical Study of Speed and Communication in Globally Distributed Software Devel-opment. IEEE Trans. on Soft. Eng., 29, 6 (Jun. 2003), 481--494.
• 17: Ellen Isaacs , Alan Walendowski , Dipti Ranganthan, Hubbub: a sound-enhanced mobile instant messenger that supports awareness and opportunistic interactions, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: Changing our world, changing ourselves, April 20-25, 2002, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA [doi>10.1145/503376.503409]
• 18: Jang, C.Y., Steinfield, C. and Pfaff, B. (2000). Supporting awareness in a web-based collaborative system: The Team-SCOPE System. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Aware-ness and the WWW, Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '00), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 2000.
• 19: 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]
• 20: Levchuk, G.M. et al. Normative Design of Project-Based Organizations -- Part III: Modeling Congruent, Robust and Adaptive Organizations. IEEE Trans. on Systems, Man & Cybernetics, 34, 3 (May. 2004), 337--350
• 21: March, J.G and Simon, H.A. Organizations. Wiley, New York, NY, 1958.
• 22: Mintzberg, H. The Structuring of Organizations: A Synthesis of the Research. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1979.
• 23: Two case studies of open source software development: Apache and Mozilla, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), v.11 n.3, p.309-346, July 2002 [doi>10.1145/567793.567795]
• 24: Olson, G.M. and Olson, J.S. Distance Matters. Human-Computer Interaction, 15, 2 & 3 (2000), 139--178.
• 25: Martin P. Robillard , Wesley Coelho , Gail C. Murphy, How Effective Developers Investigate Source Code: An Exploratory Study, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.30 n.12, p.889-903, December 2004 [doi>10.1109/TSE.2004.101]
• 26: Anita Sarma , Zahra Noroozi , André van der Hoek, Palantír: raising awareness among configuration management workspaces, Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Software Engineering, May 03-10, 2003, Portland, Oregon
• 27: Schummer, T. and Haake, J.M. (2001). Supporting Distrib-uted Software Development by Modes of Collaboration. In Proceedings of the Seventh European Conference on Com-puter Supported Cooperative Work (ECSCW '03), Helsinki, Finland, 79--98.
• 28: 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]
• 29: Thompson, J.D. Organizations in Action: Social Science Bases of Administrative Theory. McGraw-Hill, New York, NY, 1967.
• 30: Von Hippel, E. Task Partitioning: an innovation process variable. Research Policy, 19, 5 (Oct. 1990), 407--418.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces
          Subjects: Collaborative computing

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces
          Subjects: Organizational design; Computer-supported cooperative work

General Terms:
Human Factors, Management, Performance

Keywords:
collaboration tools, coordination, dynamic network analysis, task awareness tools