Extending socio-technical congruence with awareness relationships

  • Authors:

  • Irwin Kwan;Daniela Damian

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada;University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 4th international workshop on Social software engineering
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Coordination in software engineering is necessary for software teams. To study coordination, researchers need a a way to conceptualize and measure it|one such measure is socio-technical congruence. Within a team setting, awareness of other's tasks and abilities enables coordination, but the conceptualizations for socio-technical congruence do not include awareness. In this paper, our goal is to include awareness in socio-technical congruence. To do this, we conduct an empirical investigation of a team's awareness behaviour. We examine how developers transmit awareness information in a global software-engineering environment in a project called Ship using direct observations, interviews, and a questionnaire. We found that team members were satisfied with using simple awareness mechanisms such as email and meetings. We also identified that experienced team members served as brokers and filled coordination gaps, and that team members used multiple types of media simultaneously. Based on this work, we propose an aggregated sociotechnical congruence measurement that can be used to specify multiple relationships, such as awareness relationships, as interactions that satisfy technical dependencies.