Do all task dependencies require coordination? the role of task properties in identifying critical coordination needs in software projects

ABSTRACT

Several methods exist to detect the coordination needs within software teams. Evidence exists that developers’ awareness about coordination needs improves work performance. Distinguishing with certainty between critical and trivial coordination needs and identifying and prioritizing which specific tasks a pair of developers should coordinate about remains an open problem. We investigate what work dependencies should be considered when establishing coordination needs within a development team. We use our conceptualization of work dependencies named Proximity and leverage machine learning techniques to analyze what additional task properties are indicative of coordination needs. In a case study of the Mylyn project, we were able to identify from all potential coordination requirements a subset of 17% that are most critical. We define critical coordination requirements as those that can cause the most disruption to task duration when left unmanaged. These results imply that coordination awareness tools could be enhanced to make developers aware of only the coordination needs that can bring about the highest performance benefit.

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Index Terms

• Social and professional topics

  • Professional topics

    • Management of computing and information systems

      • Project and people management

• Software and its engineering

  • Software creation and management

    • Software development process management

  • Software notations and tools

    • Software configuration management and version control systems