Using agents to manage Socio-Technical Congruence in a Global Software Engineering project

Abstract

In Global Software Engineering (GSE) there are a number of communication and coordination challenges which are brought about by the factor of distance. Measuring Socio-Technical Congruence (STC) is, however, presented as a suitable technique for helping to resolve those issues. This leads us to believe that applying STC measurements to GSE might be beneficial, improving communication and coordination. However, after studying existing tools that use STC measurements, we detected some gaps, both in the way they measure STC and in the features offered by the tools for the GSE environment. That is why we have designed an Agent Architecture for coordination and communication that aims to fill the gaps found in the current tools and includes features adapted to GSE characteristics. This is achieved by taking advantage of the special features that agents offer. Moreover, this proposal has been validated in a case study performed at Indra Software Labs, a global software development company. Results show that, by using our proposal, it is possible to improve coordination and communication in a distributed environment.