The study of socio-technical coordination using a socio-technical congruence model

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dc.contributor.authorKwan, Irwin Hin-Bong
dc.contributor.supervisorDamian, Daniela
dc.date.accessioned2011-08-15T18:55:59Z
dc.date.available2011-08-15T18:55:59Z
dc.date.copyright2011en_US
dc.date.issued2011-08-15
dc.degree.departmentDepartment of Computer Science
dc.degree.levelDoctor of Philosophy Ph.D.en_US
dc.description.abstractCoordination in software development, especially in global software development, is important because a team cannot perform well unless its team members communicate and maintain awareness of each other's activities. In order to improve socio-technical coordination, which is coordination among team members who work on interdependent technical entities, it must be conceptualized and measured. One measurement of coordination is socio-technical congruence, which calculates the alignment between technical relationships and social relationships. The problem is that there are a large number of social and technical factors to consider when using socio-technical congruence to study coordination. Current limitations with socio-technical congruence include the inability to represent the size of gaps in coordination between people, the sparse understanding of the role of awareness in conjunction with other coordination mechanisms, and the lack of a technique with which to model people who are involved in certain communication patterns, but not assigned to technical tasks. To address these limitations, this dissertation describes a socio-technical congruence model to study socio-technical coordination. The model focuses on refining conceptualizations of technical and social relationships between people, on describing an improved gap technique for calculating socio-technical alignment, and on providing guidelines on how to study coordination in teams using the socio-technical congruence model. I first develop the model theoretically from related work. I then conduct two empirical investigations to address limitations of the model. The first study examines awareness in a small global team using observational studies. The second study examines important communicators and people who emerge in coordination} despite having no technical relationships by examining email archives from the same team. I conduct a third empirical investigation of a large global team to apply the model to study the relationship between socio-technical congruence and team performance using the project's repository. Finally, I revisit the model and improve it based on the empirical findings. The model refines conceptualizations of relationships, classifies emergent people who are suddenly involved with a task or a team during the project, and represents multi-variable relationships. It includes a template and an accompanying process for applying socio-technical congruence to study socio-technical coordination. This model enables researchers to study socio-technical coordination and analyze its effect on software engineering outcomes such as performance and quality.en_US
dc.description.scholarlevelGraduateen_US
dc.identifier.bibliographicCitationKwan, Irwin; Schröter, Adrian; Damian, Daniela. Does Socio-Technical Congruence Have An Effect on Software Build Success? A Study of Coordination in a Software Project. Transactions on Software Engineering, Volume 37 (3): 307--324, 2011.en_US
dc.identifier.bibliographicCitationKwan, Irwin; Damian, Daniela. The Hidden Experts in Software-Engineering Communication (NIER Track). International Conference on Software Engineering, 2011.en_US
dc.identifier.bibliographicCitationKwan, Irwin; Damian, Daniela. Extending Socio-technical Congruence with Aware- ness Relationships. Social Software Engineering 2011, in conj. ESEC/FSE, 2011.en_US
dc.identifier.bibliographicCitationMarczak, Sabrina; Kwan, Irwin; Damian, Daniela. Investigating Collaboration Driven by Requirements Investigating Col laboration Driven by Requirements in Cross-Functional Software Teams. Collaboration and Intercultural Issues on Requirements: Communication, Understanding and Softskills, in conj. Requirements Engineering, 2009.en_US
dc.identifier.bibliographicCitationKwan, Irwin; Marczak, Sabrina; Damian, Daniela. The Effects of Distance, Experience, and Communication Structure on Requirements Awareness in Two Distributed Industrial Software Projects. Global Requirements Engineering Workshop in conj. Requirements Engineering, 2007.en_US
dc.identifier.bibliographicCitationKwan, Irwin; Schröter, Adrian; Damian, Daniela. A Weighted Congruence Measure. Socio-technical Congruence Workshop, in conj. Intl. Conference on Software Engineering, 2009.en_US
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1828/3451
dc.languageEnglisheng
dc.language.isoenen_US
dc.rights.tempAvailable to the World Wide Weben_US
dc.subjectsoftware engineeringen_US
dc.subjectcoordinationen_US
dc.subjectsocio-technical congruenceen_US
dc.subjectsocio-technical coordinationen_US
dc.subjectempirical software engineeringen_US
dc.subjectmanagementen_US
dc.subjectorganizationen_US
dc.subjectrolesen_US
dc.subjectsoftware developmenten_US
dc.titleThe study of socio-technical coordination using a socio-technical congruence modelen_US
dc.typeThesisen_US

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