Building a socio-technical theory of coordination: why and how (outstanding research award)

James Herbsleb
2016 Proceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering - FSE 2016  
Research aimed at understanding and addressing coordination breakdowns experienced in global software development (GSD) projects at Lucent Technologies took a path from open-ended qualitative exploratory studies to quantitative studies with a tight focus on a key problem -delay -and its causes. Rather than being directly associated with delay, multi-site work items involved more people than comparable same-site work items, and the number of people was a powerful predictor of delay. To
more » ... this, we developed and deployed tools and practices to support more effective communication and expertise location. After conducting two case studies of open source development, an extreme form of GSD, we realized that many tools and practices could be effective for multi-site work, but none seemed to work under all conditions. To achieve deeper insight, we developed and tested our Socio-Technical Theory of Coordination (STTC) in which the dependencies among engineering decisions are seen as defining a constraint satisfaction problem that the organization can solve in a variety of ways. I conclude by explaining how we applied these ideas to transparent development environments, then sketch important open research questions. CCS Concepts • Software and its engineering➝Software creation and management 1 I focus here very egocentrically on the work that colleagues and I have done. There is, of course, a much larger literature full of major contributions by others, but space prohibits reviewing it here. A more comprehensive review is in preparation. led to incompatible actions across the sites and major delays as the problems are identified and fixed. Fundamental to the problems were a lack of awareness about who knows what, is responsible for what, and is doing what across the sites, along with the near-total absence of regular informal communication which could unearth the "unknown unknowns" of key information one doesn't know one lacks. We also noted how even limited face to face contact seemed to counteract these problems, allowing subsequent distributed work to proceed more fluidly. This led to a number of recommendations about communication practices, architectural separation, assigning a liaison role, and managing uncertainty.
doi:10.1145/2950290.2994160 dblp:conf/sigsoft/Herbsleb16 fatcat:sa4tpp4lj5cddnys3445eewwki