Socio-technical Congruence Research Articles

Emergent group understanding: Investigating intersubjectivity in sociotechnical interdependencies

AbstractTeaching with virtual worlds provides new means for collaborative learning but creates challenges for teachers in terms of IT skills. To address these challenges, we developed a teaching model for using virtual worlds in classroom practices and applied it to Minecraft in several rounds of design-based research experiments. Our conceptual framework combines ideas from software engineering (sociotechnical congruence) and social sciences (intersubjectivity and emergence). Empirically, we addressed the problem of how shared understanding evolves in computer-mediated learning activities. We video-recorded classroom activities and analyzed them using interaction analysis. The teaching model engaged the students in two interdependent processes, referred to as objects: (1) a social object (discussions) that led to a shared knowledge object (video-recorded role-play) and (2) a technology object (Minecraft buildings) for staging the role-play. Our findings include an empirical phenomenon that we call emergent group understanding, which arose from the complex social interactions between social and technology objects when Minecraft was used as a virtual world in a social studies classroom. This revealed two connected subprocesses: (1) a spontaneous act of providing information to assist learners in contextualizing their actions and interactions against a common background, and (2) setting localized goals to guide future actions and interactions. This finding extends previous research by identifying fine-grained processes of intersubjectivity that contribute to collaborative learning. More generally, our teaching model addresses the problem of balancing creative and instructional learning goals.

Information system integration, forecast information quality and market responsiveness: Role of socio-technical congruence

Organisations integrate information systems with their channel partners to improve forecasting capabilities and to respond to changes in consumers and market. Given the advancement and radical growth in information technology and the large capital outlays required for the implementation and integration of such technologies there is need for more research into how partnering organisations can maximise the benefits accruing form information systems integration. Thus, the current study tests a moderated mediated model that investigates how perceived socio-technical congruence by partnering organisations enhances the effect of interorganisational information systems integration on forecasting information quality and market responsiveness. Using absorptive capacity and socio-technical congruence theory, first, the study examines the mediating role of forecast information quality on the relationship between interorganisational information systems integration and market responsiveness. Second, the study examines the moderating role of perceived socio-technical congruence. SPSS-PROCESS model was used for the analysis. The study contributes to knowledge by extending the applicability of socio-technical congruence theory to information systems and forecasting literature in inter-organisational context. The study points to the need for high levels of socio-technical congruence between partnering organisations to maximise the benefits accruing from interorganisational information systems integration.

Assessing the impact of socio-technical congruence in software development: a systematic literature review

Software development is a critical task that depends on coordination among team members and organizational activities that bring team members together. The literature indicates various techniques that have been applied to control the coordination level among team members. Notable among these techniques is social-technical congruence (STC), which helps to measure the alignment between the social and technical capabilities of an organization and teams at various stages of software development. The dynamic nature and changes of coordination requirements make STC a potential research area in this regard. The main objective of this study is to perform a systematic literature review (SLR) that recognizes and structures existing studies that represent new evolutionary trends in the field of STC. A SLR is performed of 46 publications from 4 data sources, including journals, conferences and workshop proceedings, most of which were published between 2008 and 2019. To this end, a thorough analysis is carried out to elicit the studies based on 7 research questions in this SLR. The outcome of this SLR is a set of ample research studies representing various aspects, performance impacts, factors, and evolutionary trends in the field of STC. Furthermore, STC measurement techniques are classified in two distinct groups, matrix based and social network analysis-based measures. After a systematic exploration of these aspects, this study results in new insightful features and state of art of STC. This SLR concludes that some areas still require further investigation. For instance, (1) STC-related literature exists, but only one research work mainly focuses on the risk of overwhelming STC (i.e., excessive STC measurement may overburden the software development process); (2) STC measurement techniques facilitate the identification of congruence gaps, but no attention has been given towards the unweighted social network analysis based STC measurement models; (3) STC measurement techniques are generally applied in the development phase of the project lifecycle, but these measurements are rarely used in other software development phases, such as the requirement and testing phases or all phases; and (4) The development factors that effects on STC measurement are rarely focused by researchers in the context of various domains.

In Search of Socio-Technical Congruence: A Large-Scale Longitudinal Study

We report on a large-scale empirical study investigating the relevance of socio-technical congruence over key basic software quality metrics, namely, bugs and churn. In particular, we explore whether alignment or misalignment of social communication structures and technical dependencies in large software projects influences software quality. To this end, we have defined a quantitative and operational notion of socio-technical congruence, which we call <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">socio-technical motif congruence</i> (STMC). STMC is a measure of the degree to which developers working on the same file or on two related files, need to communicate. As socio-technical congruence is a complex and multi-faceted phenomenon, the interpretability of the results is one of our main concerns, so we have employed a careful mixed-methods statistical analysis. In particular, we provide analyses with similar techniques as employed by seminal work in the field to ensure comparability of our results with the existing body of work. The major result of our study, based on an analysis of 25 large open-source projects, is that STMC is <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">not</i> related to project quality measures—software bugs and churn—in any temporal scenario. That is, we find no statistical relationship between the alignment of developer tasks and developer communications on the one hand, and project outcomes on the other hand. We conclude that, wherefore congruence does matter as literature shows, then its measurable effect lies elsewhere.

Exploring Community Smells in Open-Source: An Automated Approach

Software engineering is now more than ever a community effort. Its success often weighs on balancing distance, culture, global engineering practices and more. In this scenario many unforeseen socio-technical events may result into additional project cost or “social” debt, e.g., sudden, collective employee turnover. With industrial research we discovered community smells , that is, sub-optimal patterns across the organisational and social structure in a software development community that are precursors of such nasty socio-technical events. To understand the impact of community smells at large, in this paper we first introduce CodeFace4Smells , an automated approach able to identify four community smell types that reflect socio-technical issues that have been shown to be detrimental both the software engineering and organisational research fields. Then, we perform a large-scale empirical study involving over 100 years worth of releases and communication structures data of 60 open-source communities: we evaluate (i) their diffuseness, i.e., how much are they distributed in open-source, (ii) how developers perceive them, to understand whether practitioners recognize their presence and their negative effects in practice, and (iii) how community smells relate to existing socio-technical factors, with the aim of assessing the inter-relations between them. The key findings of our study highlight that community smells are highly diffused in open-source and are perceived by developers as relevant problems for the evolution of software communities. Moreover, a number of state-of-the-art socio-technical indicators (e.g., socio-technical congruence) can be used to monitor how healthy a community is and possibly avoid the emergence of social debt.

Socio-Technical Congruence as an Emerging Concept in Software Development: A Scientometric Analysis and Critical Literature Review

Ample evidence in the literature emphasizes using socio-technical congruence (STC) to address coordination issues in distributed software development. The recent decades have shown a progressive growth in STC, resulting in an increasing number of research studies in the scientific corpora. However, no existing study has systematically analyzed and illustrated the research patterns, latest trends, and evolution in STC. This study aims to explore the knowledge structure and create evolutionary trajectories from STC publications. To achieve this aim, a scientometric analysis is performed that combined a critical literature review (CLR) of STC-related published research in the Web of Science and Scopus databases from 2000 to 2020. The scientometric analysis is conducted through four scientometric techniques: 1) co-word network analysis; 2) co-author network analysis; 3) co-citation analysis; 4) document clustering with timeline analysis. The study outcomes will help understand and visualize STC’s research status quo. CLR is objectively conducted to recognize the latest research topics, themes, and salient features of STC research in software development. A total of 306 bibliographic data are analyzed to generate study-related networks and density visualizations. The results reveal an evolution in the STC field from its conception to the recent developments of STC models and other related factors. This study primarily contributes to the literature by providing a systematic view related to STC research to assist software practitioners in identifying applications and key research areas. Moreover, the combination of scientometric analysis and CLR reveals key researchers, journals and conferences, institutions, prominent contributing countries, and six major research themes, including “community structure” and “socio-technical congruence” as the most prominent ones.

Predicting the emergence of community smells using socio-technical metrics: A machine-learning approach

Community smells represent sub-optimal conditions appearing within software development communities (e.g., non-communicating sub-teams, deviant contributors, etc.) that may lead to the emergence of social debt and increase the overall project’s cost. Previous work has studied these smells under different perspectives, investigating their nature, diffuseness, and impact on technical aspects of source code. Furthermore, it has been shown that some socio-technical metrics like, for instance, the well-known socio-technical congruence, can potentially be employed to foresee their appearance. Yet, there is still a lack of knowledge of the actual predictive power of such socio-technical metrics. In this paper, we aim at tackling this problem by empirically investigating (i) the potential value of socio-technical metrics as predictors of community smells and (ii) what is the performance of within- and cross-project community smell prediction models based on socio-technical metrics. To this aim, we exploit a dataset composed of 60 open-source projects and consider four community smells such as Organizational Silo, Black Cloud, Lone Wolf, and Bottleneck. The key results of our work report that a within-project solution can reach F-Measure and AUC-ROC of 77% and 78%, respectively, while cross-project models still require improvements, being however able to reach an F-Measure of 62% and overcome a random baseline. Among the metrics investigated, socio-technical congruence, communicability, and turnover-related metrics are the most powerful predictors of the emergence of community smells.

On the fulfillment of coordination requirements in open-source software projects: An exploratory study

In large-scale open-source software projects, where developers are often distributed across the entire planet, coordination among developers is crucial. To estimate whether a state of socio-technical congruence is achieved, which is associated with software quality and project success, we assess the alignment of collaboration and communication in such software projects in terms of coordination requirements. By means of an empirical study on a substantial set of large-scale open-source software projects—the development histories of all projects sum up to over 180 years—we aim at shedding light on this issue. To this end, to take a more semantic view on this phenomenon in comparison to previous work, we do not only identify coordination requirements arising from files and functions only, but also those arising from features. We found that open-source developers fulfill coordination requirements intentionally, but mostly those coordination requirements that arise from coupled source-code artifacts, while they resolve simpler ones independently. Furthermore, neither of the considered abstraction levels of source-code artifacts (files, functions, features) is more suitable to construct coordination requirements with respect to their fulfillment. This finding strongly indicates that features do not play an as important role in the development process as expected and commonly believed by the research community in the area of feature-oriented and feature-driven development. Finally, we identified notable evolutionary trends in the fulfillment of coordination requirements and showed that far-reaching social events (such as organizational issues) have a huge impact on their fulfillment, both negatively and positively. The key findings of our empirical study are that socio-technical relations are important to understand open-source development communities and that the incorporation of different abstraction levels for developer collaboration does yield important insights to further improve the evolution in open-source software projects.

File-level socio-technical congruence and its relationship with bug proneness in OSS projects

Coordination is important in software development. Socio-Technical Congruence (STC) is proposed to measure the match between coordination requirements and actual coordination activities. The previous work of Cataldo et al. computes STC in commercial projects and finds it related to software failures. In this paper, we study the relationship between file-level STC and bug proneness in Open Source Software (OSS) projects. We apply the fundamental STC framework to the OSS data setting and present a method of computing file-level STC based on our available data. We also propose a derivative STC metric called Missing Developer Links (MDL), which is to measure the amount of coordination breakdowns. In our empirical analysis on five OSS projects, we find that MDL is more related to bug proneness than STC. Furthermore, STC or MDL can be computed based on different types of file networks and developer networks, and we find out the best file network and the best developer network via an empirical study. We also evaluate the usefulness of STC or MDL metrics in bug prediction. This work is promising to help detect coordination issues in OSS projects.

A Study of Social Interactions in Open Source Component Use

All kinds of software projects, whether open or closed source, rely on open source components. Repositories that serve open source components to organizations, such as the Central Repository and npmjs.org , report billions of requests per year. Despite the widespread reliance of projects on open source components, little is known about the social interactions that occur between developers of a project using a component and developers of the component itself. In this paper, we investigate the social interactions that occur for 5,133 pairs of projects, from two different communities (Java and Ruby) representing user projects that depend on a component project. We consider such questions as how often are there social interactions when a component is used? When do the social interactions occur? And, why do social interactions occur? From our investigation, we observed that social interactions typically occur after a component has been chosen for use and relied upon. When social interactions occur, they most frequently begin with creating issues or feature requests. We also found that the more use a component receives, the less likely it is that developers of project using the component will interact with the component project, and when those interactions occur, they will be shorter in duration. Our results provide insight into how socio-technical interactions occur beyond the level of an individual or small group of projects previously studied by others and identify the need for a new model of socio-technical congruence for dependencies between, instead of within, projects.

A systematic mapping study about socio-technical congruence

ContextLack of coordination may create significant problems between work teams, this problem is even most critical when team workers are geographically distributed as it results in cost increases a...

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

No Abstract Keywords: coordination; software development; software project; software engineering project; socio-technical congruence

A brief method to assess the association of socio and technical dependencies on software quality

Managing coordination among developers is very challenging when dependent task occurred since the quality of the software during development need to be maintained. Socio-Technical Congruence (STC) introduced to measure the coordination and help to identify the coordination breakdown from the root of development. However, since STC is a new area in software engineering, there are limited researches on this study. That provides opportunities to expand STC study by investigate the relationship of socio and technical dependencies on software quality in software engineering project. This paper outline related research, literature review and the method used to conduct the study.

How does developer interaction relate to software quality? an examination of product development data

Industrial software systems are being increasingly developed by large and distributed teams. Tools like collaborative development environments (CDE) are used to facilitate interaction between members of such teams, with the expectation that social factors around the interaction would facilitate team functioning. In this paper, we first identify typically social characteristics of interaction in a software development team: reachability, connection, association, and clustering. We then examine how these factors relate to the quality of software produced by a team, in terms of the number of defects, through an empirical study of 70+ teams, involving 900+ developers in total, spread across 30+ locations and 19 time-zones, working on 40,000+ units of work in the multi-version development of a major industrial product, spreading across more than five years. After controlling for known factors affecting large scale distributed development such as dependency, system age, developer expertise and experience, geographic dispersion, socio-technical congruence, and the number of files changed, we find statistically significant effects of connection and clustering on software quality. Higher levels of intra-team connection are found to relate to higher defect count, whereas more clustering relates to fewer defects. We examine the implications of these results for individual developers, project managers, and organizations.

Measuring The Impact of Socio-Technical Congruence in a Different Types of Software Life Cycle

Measuring developer coordination is a fundamental challenge and complex task in software development organizations. One way used to conceptualize and measure developer coordination is known as 'Socio-Technical Congruence (STC)', which is fit between the coordination requirements established by the dependencies among tasks and the actual coordination activities carried out by the developers. However, STC has not been widely accepted as a broad theory. This is for the reason that, STC is relatively new, and there are many fundamental questions that need to be addressed and understood. This research intend to construct a model of the relationship between STC and project performance in the different types of software development lifecycle. The model constructed can be used to provide additional evidence to the body of knowledge, which will further strengthen the STC theory. Therefore, we outline research questions, the proposed method used to conduct the research, potential contributions and the expected results of the research.

Assessing the Impact of Socio-Technical Dependencies on Software Defect

One of the measures used to fit or align social and technical dependencies is known as Socio-Technical Congruence (STC). However, STC is a new and vastly unexplored area. To our best knowledge, there has been limited research done on the use of STC in software engineering projects. Hence, this provides an opportunity to extend the body of knowledge by investigating the impact of STC on other measures such as software quality. This paper outlines the motivation behind this said research, the methodology and expected findings of this research. This research aims to provide further information about the domain of STC in software engineering field, specifically its relationship with software quality. The expected result of this research is a higher level of congruence in a development project can yield a higher quality project.

A Network‐Based Analysis of Team Coordination and Shared Cognition in Systems Engineering

ABSTRACTThis paper presents a network‐based approach for analyzing team coordination and shared cognition in engineering design teams. The research setting is an Integrated Concurrent Engineering (ICE) laboratory in which teams of approximately 20 engineers are collocated to conduct rapid conceptual design of scientific spacecraft. A design structure matrix (DSM) of expected interactions is constructed from technical information flow data, and DSM representations of reported interactions are created using survey data from 10 ICE design teams. A comparative analysis of expected and reported interactions is used to calculate a metric of team coordination called socio‐technical congruence (STC). To examine shared cognition, pairwise shared mental models (SMMs) are measured using pre‐ and post‐session surveys on system design drivers. Shared knowledge networks (SMMs as edges) are constructed, and team learning is measured as the change in network structure over time. Analysis reveals statistically significant correlations between team learning and each of three technical attributes (system development time, launch mass, and mission concept maturity) and between team learning and team coordination. These results indicate that team members learn most from each other when working on difficult or unfamiliar problems and when expected and reported interactions are aligned. The paper concludes that team coordination and the design product in ICE are not necessarily directly related to each other but that both are related to shared cognition. Although this study focuses on conceptual design, it lays the foundation for future work examining the role of team coordination and shared cognition in full‐scale system development programs.

1.3.1 Information Flow, Team Coordination, and Shared Knowledge in Integrated Concurrent Engineering

AbstractLarge‐scale systems engineering efforts involve complex interactions that must be managed throughout the entire life cycle. Prior research has analyzed the relationship between expected and actual communication in engineering design teams. This study builds on that previous research by incorporating the cognitive aspects of design into the analysis. Based on 10 design sessions of an Integrated Concurrent Engineering (ICE) environment, Design Structure Matrix (DSM) representations of expected and reported interactions are constructed and used to calculate a metric of team coordination called socio‐technical congruence (STC). By computing the correlation between STC and a previously developed metric of shared cognition in teams, a relationship is found between team coordination and change in shared knowledge. Based on these results, it is concluded that design team members learn the most when expected and reported interactions are aligned – that is, when the team follows a well‐defined process based on information flow in the technical design.

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

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.

Socio-Technical Dependencies in Forked OSS Projects: Evidence from the BSD Family

Existing studies show that open source projectsmay enjoy high level of socio-technical congruence despitetheir open and distributed character. Such observation isyet to be confirmed in the case of forking, where projectsoriginating from the same root evolve in parallel and aretypically lead by different development teams. In this paper,we empirically investigate the endogenous and exogenouscharacteristics of BSD family projects related to socio-technical congruence. Our motivation is that BSD family,as a representative example of forked projects, share acommon development ground for both the code-base andthe development community, which may influence theirevolution from a socio-technical perspective. Our studyresults show that the BSD family maintain a certain levelof collaboration throughout the project history, mainly dueto a shared portion of the community. This partly explainsthe relative harmony of socio-technical congruence levels inthe BSD projects.