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Socio-technical congruence: a framework for assessing the impact of technical and work dependencies on software development productivity

Authors:

Marcelo Cataldo,

James D. Herbsleb,

Kathleen M. CarleyAuthors Info & Claims

ESEM '08: Proceedings of the Second ACM-IEEE international symposium on Empirical software engineering and measurement

Pages 2 - 11

https://doi.org/10.1145/1414004.1414008

Published: 09 October 2008 Publication History

Abstract

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, has serious limitations in the context of software development. We build on the idea of congruence, proposed in our prior work, to examine the relationship between the structure of technical and work dependencies and the impact of dependencies 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 significantly reduced. Furthermore, our analysis highlights the importance of identifying the "right" set of technical dependencies that drive the coordination requirements among software developers. Call and data dependencies appear to have far less impact than logical dependencies.

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Cited By

Schueller WWachs J(2024)Modeling interconnected social and technical risks in open source software ecosystemsCollective Intelligence10.1177/263391372412319123:1Online publication date: 15-Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.1177/26339137241231912
Razzaq ABuckley JLai QYu TBotterweck G(2024)A Systematic Literature Review on the Influence of Enhanced Developer Experience on Developers' Productivity: Factors, Practices, and RecommendationsACM Computing Surveys10.1145/368729957:1(1-46)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3687299
Paradis CKazman RTamburri D(2024)Analyzing the Tower of Babel with KaiauluJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2024.111967210:COnline publication date: 1-Apr-2024
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Index Terms

Socio-technical congruence: a framework for assessing the impact of technical and work dependencies on software development productivity
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Management of computing and information systems
      1. Project and people management
        Systems development
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Collaboration in software development
      1. Programming teams

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cover image ACM Conferences

ESEM '08: Proceedings of the Second ACM-IEEE international symposium on Empirical software engineering and measurement

October 2008

374 pages

ISBN:9781595939715

DOI:10.1145/1414004

General Chair:
Dieter Rombach
University of Kaiserslautern and Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (Germany)
,
Program Chairs:
Sebastian Elbaum
University of Nebraska-Lincoln (USA)
,
Jürgen Münch
Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (Germany)

Copyright © 2008 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 09 October 2008

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ESEM '08: 2008 ACM-IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement

October 9 - 10, 2008

Kaiserslautern, Germany

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Razzaq ABuckley JLai QYu TBotterweck G(2024)A Systematic Literature Review on the Influence of Enhanced Developer Experience on Developers' Productivity: Factors, Practices, and RecommendationsACM Computing Surveys10.1145/368729957:1(1-46)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3687299
Paradis CKazman RTamburri D(2024)Analyzing the Tower of Babel with KaiauluJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2024.111967210:COnline publication date: 1-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jss.2024.111967
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