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A case study of distances in a large co-located software development organisation

Authors:

Elizabeth Bjarnason,

Baldvin Gislason Bern,

Linda SvedbergAuthors Info & Claims

CHASE '18: Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering

Pages 1 - 8

https://doi.org/10.1145/3195836.3195846

Published: 27 May 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Communication and collaboration is a major challenge for large-scale software development. Cognitive and psychological distance between individuals and teams affect this collaboration and can cause communications gaps. We propose a novel method for assessing distance between teams, and explore potential explanations for these distances. In an exploratory case study of the quality assurance department at Axis Communications, we used interactive posters to collect data and obtained a 52% response rate from the 175 test engineers. We identified low psychological distance as an indicator of a company culture with open and frequent communication, and of a team with good social networking skills and well-functioning points of contact. We found that low cognitive distance is an indicator of differences regarding the responsibilities of a team; within the same system and between different types of systems. We also found correlations between psychological and cognitive distance. Large organisations may apply our concept to assess distance between teams, and our finding can be useful in interpreting these distances. Furthermore, our results provide a basis for further research on how the concept of distances can be used to assess collaboration within large organisations.

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Cited By

Milfont PAlbuquerque ALeite G(2024)Management of Remote Work in Distributed Software Development: A Systematic Literature ReviewSoftware Engineering Methods Design and Application10.1007/978-3-031-70285-3_12(153-175)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-70285-3_12
De Quadros ELisboa ASouza MPrikladnicki RChaves M(2022)The migration from forced remote work to hybrid work and its impacts on software quality: the case of a multinational companyProceedings of the XXI Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality10.1145/3571473.3571498(1-10)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3571473.3571498
Bjarnason EGislason Bern BSvedberg L(2022)Inter-team communication in large-scale co-located software engineering: a case studyEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-021-10027-z27:2Online publication date: 5-Jan-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-021-10027-z
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

A case study of distances in a large co-located software development organisation
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Collaborative and social computing
    1. Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software organization and properties

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CHASE '18: Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering

May 2018

136 pages

ISBN:9781450357258

DOI:10.1145/3195836

Conference Chairs:
Helen Sharp
The Open University, United Kingdom
,
Cleidson R. B. de Souza
Universidade Federal do Pará and Instituto Tecnológico Vale, Tv, Brazil
,
Daniel Graziotin
University of Stuttgart, Germany
,
Meira Levy
Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art, Israel
,
David Socha
University of Washington Bothell

Copyright © 2018 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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SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering
IEEE-CS: Computer Society

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 27 May 2018

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ICSE '18

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IEEE-CS

ICSE '18: 40th International Conference on Software Engineering

May 27, 2018

Gothenburg, Sweden

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Overall Acceptance Rate 47 of 70 submissions, 67%

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Cited By

Milfont PAlbuquerque ALeite G(2024)Management of Remote Work in Distributed Software Development: A Systematic Literature ReviewSoftware Engineering Methods Design and Application10.1007/978-3-031-70285-3_12(153-175)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-70285-3_12
De Quadros ELisboa ASouza MPrikladnicki RChaves M(2022)The migration from forced remote work to hybrid work and its impacts on software quality: the case of a multinational companyProceedings of the XXI Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality10.1145/3571473.3571498(1-10)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3571473.3571498
Bjarnason EGislason Bern BSvedberg L(2022)Inter-team communication in large-scale co-located software engineering: a case studyEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-021-10027-z27:2Online publication date: 5-Jan-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-021-10027-z
Lopes AOliveira EConte Tde Souza CDittrich YFagerholm FHoda RSocha DSteinmacher I(2019)Directives of communicabilityProceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering10.1109/CHASE.2019.00019(45-48)Online publication date: 27-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/CHASE.2019.00019

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