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On the perceived interdependence and information sharing inhibitions of enterprise software engineers

Published: 11 February 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Software teams often have trouble coordinating shared work due to poor communication practices. We surveyed software engineers (N=989) at Microsoft to investigate three rarely explored aspects of coordination: (1) how an engineer's perception of dependence is predicted by his organizational characteristics, (2) how this perception differs when the dependence varies by the kinds of shared work artifacts, and (3) how the work group range affects the likelihood that an engineer will share information about work artifacts with another. Our results indicate that engineers tailor their communications about shared work for each group of intended recipients. This suggests that many existing coordination tools that rely on automatic mining and visualization of engineering activities have prevented senders from controlling the distribution of information about their work, and may have overestimated the receivers' abilities to comprehend it.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CSCW '12: Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
    February 2012
    1460 pages
    ISBN:9781450310864
    DOI:10.1145/2145204
    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: 11 February 2012

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    Author Tags

    1. awareness
    2. communication
    3. coordination
    4. enterprise software development

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    February 11 - 15, 2012
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    • (2020)On the use of coordination strategies in complex engineered system design projectsDesign Science10.1017/dsj.2020.296Online publication date: 4-Dec-2020
    • (2015)Supporting Developers' Coordination in the IDEProceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing10.1145/2675133.2675177(518-532)Online publication date: 28-Feb-2015
    • (2014)On the Comprehension of Program ComprehensionACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/262266923:4(1-37)Online publication date: 5-Sep-2014
    • (2013)A Decade of Conway's LawProceedings of the 2013 3rd International Workshop on Replication in Empirical Software Engineering Research10.1109/RESER.2013.14(1-14)Online publication date: 9-Oct-2013
    • (2012)Facilitating enterprise software developer communication with CARESProceedings of the 2012 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM)10.1109/ICSM.2012.6405317(527-536)Online publication date: 23-Sep-2012
    • (undefined)Online Reputational Loss Aversion: Empirical Evidence from StackOverflow.comSSRN Electronic Journal10.2139/ssrn.2603303

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