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

  • Authors:

  • Alicia M. Grubb;Andrew Begel

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada;Microsoft Research, Redmond, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
  • Year:
  • 2012

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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.