Detecting Coordination Problems in Collaborative Software Development Environments

TL;DR

This paper presents a method and tool for detecting coordination problems in collaborative software development by analyzing socio-technical patterns, tested in a real-world case study.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining social network analysis with technical dependency analysis to identify coordination issues.

Findings

Effective detection of coordination problems in a real case study.

The method helps project managers improve collaboration practices.

Tool supports proactive management of socio-technical dependencies.

Abstract

Software development is rarely an individual effort and generally involves teams of developers collaborating to generate good reliable code. Among the software code there exist technical dependencies that arise from software components using services from other components. The different ways of assigning the design, development, and testing of these software modules to people can cause various coordination problems among them. We claim that the collaboration of the developers, designers and testers must be related to and governed by the technical task structure. These collaboration practices are handled in what we call Socio-Technical Patterns. The TESNA project (Technical Social Network Analysis) we report on in this paper addresses this issue. We propose a method and a tool that a project manager can use in order to detect the socio-technical coordination problems. We test the method and tool in a case study of a small and innovative software product company.