Coordination in large-scale software teams

Authors:
Andrew Begel;Nachiappan Nagappan;Christopher Poile;Lucas Layman
Affiliations:
Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA 98052, USA;Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA 98052, USA;Edwards School of Business, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada;National Research Council, Ottawa, ON, Canada
Venue:
CHASE '09 Proceedings of the 2009 ICSE Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects on Software Engineering
Year:
2009

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Abstract

Large-scale software development requires coordination within and between very large engineering teams which may be located in different buildings, on different company campuses, and in different time zones. From a survey answered by 775 Microsoft software engineers, we learned how work was coordinated within and between teams and how engineers felt about their success at these tasks. The respondents revealed that the most common objects of coordination are schedules and features, not code or interfaces, and that more communication and personal contact worked better to make interactions between teams go more smoothly.