Socio-technical Congruence Research Articles

Coordination Breakdowns and Their Impact on Development Productivity and Software Failures

The success of software development projects depends on carefully 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. Although that research stream has been quite influential, it considers a static view of the problem of coordination in engineering activities. Building on a dynamic view of coordination, we studied the relationship between socio-technical congruence and software quality and development productivity. In order to investigate the generality of our findings, our analyses were performed on two large-scale projects from two companies with distinct characteristics in terms of product and process maturity. Our results revealed that the gaps between coordination requirements and the actual coordination activities carried out by the developers significantly increased software failures. Our analyses also showed that higher levels of congruence are associated with improved development productivity. Finally, our results showed the congruence between dependencies and coordinative actions is critical both in mature development settings as well as in novel and dynamic development contexts.

Does Socio-Technical Congruence Have an Effect on Software Build Success? A Study of Coordination in a Software Project

Socio-technical congruence is an approach that measures coordination by examining the alignment between the technical dependencies and the social coordination in the project. We conduct a case study of coordination in the IBM Rational Team Concert project, which consists of 151 developers over seven geographically distributed sites, and expect that high congruence leads to a high probability of successful builds. We examine this relationship by applying two congruence measurements: an unweighted congruence measure from previous literature, and a weighted measure that overcomes limitations of the existing measure. We discover that there is a relationship between socio-technical congruence and build success probability, but only for certain build types, and observe that in some situations, higher congruence actually leads to lower build success rates. We also observe that a large proportion of zero-congruence builds are successful, and that socio-technical gaps in successful builds are larger than gaps in failed builds. Analysis of the social and technical aspects in IBM Rational Team Concert allows us to discuss the effects of congruence on build success. Our findings provide implications with respect to the limits of applicability of socio-technical congruence and suggest further improvements of socio-technical congruence to study coordination.

COMMUNICATION, TEAM PERFORMANCE, AND THE INDIVIDUAL: BRIDGING TECHNICAL DEPENDENCIES.

Failure of software development projects is common. Often one of the major factors is poor communication between individuals on the development team. However, improving coordination requires more than just increasing communication. The Socio-Technical Congruence (STC) metric helps make sense out of the complicated highly-dynamic coordination requirements between team members by analyzing the relationship between communication and task dependencies obtained from work artifacts (Cataldo, Herbsleb, & Carley, 2008). Previous research computed STC from data contained in software repositories and found that high values of STC in a commercial software engineering setting led to higher team performance (Cataldo, Wagstrom, Herbsleb, & Carley, 2006), but did not differentiate cleanly between the effects of communication aligned with coordination requirements and that which was not. In this work we extend STC, creating an individual metric and two sub-measures that distinguish between communication that is aligned w...

Socio-Technical Congruence: A Framework for Assessing the Impact of Technical and Work Dependencies on Software Development

Socio-Technical Congruence: A Framework for Assessing the Impact of Technical and Work Dependencies on Software Development

Socio-Technical Congruence: A Framework for Assessing the Impact of Technical and Work Dependencies on Software Development

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, is not a sufficient representation of work dependencies in the context of software development. We build on the idea of congruence proposed by Cataldo et al [10] to examine the relationship between the structure of technical and work dependencies and their impact 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, on average, reduced by 32%. Those findings highlight the importance of identifying the “right” set of product dependencies that drive the coordination requirements among software developers.