Supporting team coordination of software development across multiple companies
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The doctoral thesis explores team coordination challenges in distributed software development (DSD) across organizational boundaries, emphasizing the impact of open-source software collaboration. It identifies critical issues such as technical dependencies, communication structures, and policy influences, offering recommendations to enhance cross-boundary coordination practices. The research synthesizes findings from multiple studies and discusses the roles of boundary spanners and coordination tools in managing collaboration effectively.
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RQ2: How do organizational boundaries impact
coordination of development activities in DSD?
o Collaboration policies influence the attitude toward the joint
work
“...so we are in the competition with [Team A1]. Maybe [Team A1]
want to do it too so we need to discuss and make arguments about
why should we do it instead…But we also want to look good
compared to [Team A1]. And we know they want to do the same ...”
(Manager – Case River – Study S4)](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/dissertationslidever1-150414122309-conversion-gate01/85/Supporting-team-coordination-of-software-development-across-multiple-companies-15-320.jpg)
Supporting team coordination of software development across multiple companies
- 1. Supporting team coordination of software development across organizational boundary Anh Nguyen Duc Doctoral thesis presentation Trondheim, Norway April 10th 2015
- 2. 2 Agenda Research problem Goal & Research questions Overview of studies Synthesis of findings Discussion & Conclusion
- 3. 3 Research context Open Source Software as a collaborative phenomenon between companies and communities Global Software Development across geographical, temporal, organizational boundaries Distributed Software Development = OSS + GSD OSS GSD DSD
- 4. 4 Insufficient support of DSD coordination Iteration 2 Iteration 3 Iteration 4 changes X John Jack Peter John ….. Jack Peter
- 5. 5 Little is known about cross-boundary coordination problems Technical dependencies Communication structure Coordination problems Coordination problems and mechanisms within an organization might be different from those across organizations Outsourcing Offshored insourcing Vendor-to-vendor OSS development …
- 6. 6 Little is known about cross-boundary coordination mechanisms Global boundaries Coordination problems Coordination mechanisms Organizational boundaries Project outcomes is part of impacts impacts resolves People is part of Technology Process
- 7. 7 Research goal Global boundaries Coordination problems Coordination mechanisms Organizational boundaries Project outcomes is part of impacts impacts resolves People is part of Technology Process to understand and improve team coordination challenges in organizational boundaries in DSD
- 8. 8 Research questions ① How is the collaboration of technical tasks characterized at organizational level? ② How do organizational boundaries impact coordination of development activities in distributed software development? ③ How can coordination practices and tools support software development across organizational boundaries?
- 9. 9 Agenda Research problem Goal & Research questions Overview of studies Synthesis of findings Discussion & Conclusion
- 10. 10 Overview of studies S1: OSS integration in commercial companies S2: Collaboration in OSS projects S3: Impacts of global boundaries in DSD S4: Organizational boundary and spanners S5: Forking and coordination in multiple platform systems RQ1: How is the collaboration of technical tasks characterized at organizational level? RQ2: How do organizational boundaries impact coordination of development activities in distributed software development? RQ3: How can coordination practices and tools support software development across organizational boundaries? 2011 2012 2013 2014 year
- 11. 11 Research methodology S1: OSS integration in commercial companies S3: Impacts of global boundaries in DSD S4: Organizational boundary and spanners S5: Forking and coordination in multiple platform systems RQ1: How is the collaboration of technical tasks characterized at organizational level? RQ2: How do organizational boundaries impact coordination of development activities in distributed software development? RQ3: How can coordination practices and tools support software development across organizational boundaries? S2: Collaboration in OSS projects
- 12. 12 Data collection and analysis Phases Elements S1 S2 S3 S4 S5 Data collection Issue tracking system X X X Version control system X Survey X Interview X X X Observation X Document X X X Data analysis Thematic analysis X X X X Meta analysis X Statistic analysis X X X Correlation analysis X X Regression analysis X X
- 13. 13 Agenda Research problem Goal & Research questions Overview of studies Synthesis of findings Discussion & Conclusion
- 14. 14 RQ1: How is the collaboration of technical tasks characterized at the organizational level? o OSS inter-organizational collaboration o commensalistic relationship between companies and communities o indirect interactions among companies via OSS infrastructures o Commercial inter-organizational collaboration o various types of technical dependencies across boundaries
- 15. 15 RQ2: How do organizational boundaries impact coordination of development activities in DSD? o Collaboration policies influence the attitude toward the joint work “...so we are in the competition with [Team A1]. Maybe [Team A1] want to do it too so we need to discuss and make arguments about why should we do it instead…But we also want to look good compared to [Team A1]. And we know they want to do the same ...” (Manager – Case River – Study S4)
- 16. 16 RQ2: How do organizational boundaries impact coordination of development activities in DSD? o Collaboration policies influence the attitude toward the joint work o Mismatches in engineering processes inhibit some coordination mechanisms “...we work in such different ways that we don’t share work processes. We communicated in a higher level than what we are doing now ...” (Team leader – Case Ocean – Study S4)
- 17. 17 RQ2: How do organizational boundaries impact coordination of development activities in DSD? o Collaboration policies influence the attitude toward the joint work o Mismatches in engineering processes inhibit some coordination mechanisms o Limited ability to organizing team structure increases escalation and coordination needs o Differences in development practices and standards introduce misexpectation of quality and performance of the joint work
- 18. 18 RQ3: How can coordination practices and tools support coordination of development activities across organizational boundaries? Emergent vs. formally assigned Product owner Scrum master Program manager Product owner Hub developer Team leader Bridge engineer Mediate technical dependencies Transfer status information Leverage global barriers Facilitate practice flow Commercial vs. OSS projects Comprehending and transferring tasks Site visit Enforcing practice around boundary object Small vs. large project
- 19. 19 RQ3: How can coordination practices and tools support coordination of development activities across organizational boundaries? o Duplication dependency o Issue tracking systems – Trace dependencies of cross- platform issues – Notify relevant developers about the changes of the issues – Facilitate cross-platform reviews o Version control systems – Temporize coordination needs Issue tracking system Version control systemsVersion control systemsVersion control systems Issue tracking systemIssue tracking systems Team A Team B Team C
- 20. 20 Agenda Research problem Goal & Research questions Overview of studies Synthesis of findings Discussion & Conclusion
- 21. 21 Contribution to research ① Updated view about the participation of commercial companies in OSS projects ② Synthesized existing knowledge about the impacts of global boundaries on DSD project outcomes ③ Extension of the socio-technical coordination with organizational dimension ④ Illustration of the use of boundary spanning theory in DSD context ⑤ Description of duplication dependencies and approaches to manage them
- 22. 22 Recommendations to practice ① Be aware of different impacts of global boundaries on project outcomes ② Consider both business and technical aspects when making cross-boundary coordination strategies ③ Identify, recognize and support emergent boundary spanners ④ Navigate informal communication by enforcing process standards ⑤ Automate the notification of dependent issues across codebases ⑥ Establish a united code merging process across codebases ⑦ Enhance cross-function communication of dependent issues
- 23. 23 Limitations o Evaluation of coordination mechanisms o Exploratory investigation of collaboration and coordination o General types of coordination problems o Generalization about coordination mechanisms
- 24. 24 Future work o Quantify some aspects of organizational boundaries o Evaluate the effectiveness of team coordination mechanisms in DSD o Investigate the phenomenon of co-opetition o Explore temporal evolution of coordination of duplicated files
- 25. 25 Acknowledgement o Dedicated supervisions by Prof. Reidar Conradi, Dr. Daniela S. Cruzes, Dr. Carl-Fredrik Sørensen, Assoc. Prof. Torgeir Dingsøyr o External supervisions and supports by Prof. Audris Mockus o Evaluation and suggestions by Ph.D committee Assoc. Prof. Carolyn Seaman, Assoc. Prof. Marco Torchiano, Prof. Guttorm Sindre o Collaboration and paper co-authors o Dr. Claudia Ayala, Assoc. Prof. Xavier Franch, Prof. Martin Höst, Prof. Muhammad Alibabar, Randy Hackbarth, John Palframan o Fruitful discussions o Assoc. Prof. Darja Šmite, Prof. Jim Herbsleb o IDI PhD Seminar, Forskerfabrikken o Companies and organizations o Fundator, Capgemini, Fast, FPT, Avaya, Wireshark community, Samba community and others participated in our OSS adoption survey
- 26. 26 Q&A
- 28. 28 BK2-Theory background Theory Study Description Socio-technical congruence by Marcelo Cataldo S1 Basic for SNA Dimensions of global dispersions by Espinosa S3 Form data extraction forms Inter-discipline theory of coordination by Malone S3 Explore dependencies and coorination activities Framework coordination mechanisms by Kotlarsky, Mintzbergs S3, S4, S5 Classify coordination activities Boundary spanner in practice by Levina S4, S5 Differentiate emerged and assigned spanners
- 29. 29 BK3-Publication list • MP1. Nguyen Duc, A., Cruzes D. S., Ayala C. P. and Conradi, R. (2011). Impact of Stakeholder Type and Collaboration on Issue Resolution Time in OSS Projects. Open Source Software Conference (OSS), Salvador, Brazil. • MP2. Nguyen Duc, A., Cruzes D. S., Conradi, R., Host M., Franch X. and Ayala, C. P. (2012). Collaborative Resolution of Requirements Mismatches When Adopting Open Source Components. 18th International Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality, Essen, Germany. • MP3. Ayala, C. P, Cruzes D. S., Nguyen Duc, A., Conradi, R., Franch X., Host M. and Muhammad A. B. (2012). OSS Integration Issues and Community Support: An Integrator Perspective. Open Source Software Conference (OSS), Hammamet, Tunisia. • MP4. Nguyen Duc, A., Cruzes D.S. and Conradi, R. (2015). The impact of global dispersion on coordination, team performance and software quality – A systematic literature review. Information and Software Technology, 57, 277-294. • MP5. Nguyen Duc, A. and Cruzes D. S. (2013). The influence of organizational distance on technical coordination – An exploratory study. 8th IEEE International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE), Bari, Italy. • MP6. Nguyen Duc, A., Cruzes D.S. and Conradi, R. 2014. On the role of boundary spanners as team coordination mechanism in organizationally distributed projects. 9th IEEE International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE), Shanghai, China. • MP7. Nguyen Duc, A., Mockus, A., Hackbarth R., and Palframan, J. (2014). Forking and coordination in multi-platform development: a case study. The ACM / IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM), Torino, Italy. • MP8. Nguyen Duc, A., Mockus, A., Hackbarth R., and Palframan, J. (2014). A longitudinal case study of coordination in multiple platform development. Submitted to Journal of Empirical Software Engineering. • SP1. Nguyen Duc, A., Daniela, S. C., Reidar, C., & Claudia, A. (2011). Empirical validation of human factors in predicting issue lead time in open source projects. 7th International Conference on Predictive Models in Software Engineering, Banff, Alberta, Canada. • SP2. Nguyen Duc A., Cruzes D. S. and Conradi R. (2012). Competition on inter-organizational collaboration from an organizational-social-technical perspective. 5th International Workshop on Co-operative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering, Zurich, Switzerland. • SP3. Nguyen-Duc, A., Daniela, S. C., & Reidar, C. (2012). Dispersion, coordination and performance in global software teams: a systematic review. 12th ACM-IEEE international symposium on Empirical software engineering and measurement, Lund, Sweden
- 30. 30 BK4-Threats to validity Validity threats Category Study Solution Bias can occur in project/ team selection Internal validity S1, S2, S4, S5 Select wide range of DSD projects Preliminarily analyze candidate projects Bias in data collection Internal validity S1, S4, S5 Thorough plan and review study designs by external experts Misinterpretation during interviews Internal validity S1, S4, S5 Send interview questions beforehand Include more than one interviewers Send post-interview clarifying questions Identification of commercial company representatives Internal validity S1 Manually check multiple sources to determine developer’s affiliation Compounding factor in quantitative model Internal validity S2, S5 Include context factors into quantitative models Missing repository data Internal validity S2, S5 Delete invalid data points with considering the significance of analysis bias Generalization to software development External validity S1, S2, S3, S4, S5 Determine target population when design study Consider all context factors when drawing conclusion about generalization Credibility of findings External validity S5 Iteratively provide and receive feedback from relevant stakeholders Operationalization of concepts Construct validity S2, S5 Use literature and initial interviews to provide reasoning for constructing measures Causal-effect relationship Conclusion validity S2, S5 No attempt to draw a causal relationship
- 31. 31 BK5-Recommendations 1. Using measures of developer’s past performance to predict issue resolution time 2. Involving external stakeholders in resolving OSS component mismatches 3. Alignment of perception on distributed work across time-zones with actual impact 4. Awareness of the influence of global dispersion at different organizational levels 5. No distribution for quality critical software components 6. Establishment of formal coordination approach 7. Establishment of code integration policy across platforms 8. Balance of technical requirement of coordination and organizational policy of competition 9. Identification and recognition of in-practice boundary spanner 10. Automated identification of redundant work across platforms 11. Enhancement of communication across functional units 12. Considering organizational-technical issues when creating forks across platforms
Editor's Notes
- #2: Good afternoon and thank you everyone for coming today. I will present about what I have investigated last four years in this half hour speech. My thesis title is …. The work is supervised by Professor Reidar Conradi, Carl Sorgensne, Daniela Cruzes and Torgeir Dingsoyr
- #3: In this presentation, firstly I will talk about the gap in research about coordination in global software development. And from this, I present the goal of my study and the research questions. After that, I will talk about the overview of 5 studies was conducted as part of this ph.d Then, is the contribution for both research and practice And finally I will talk about the limitation of my research and the opportuniries for future work
- #4: At first , My research at IDI started as part of a project to explore the challenges and practices in adopting Open source software In this research line, software ecosystem emerges with the focus on interaction of companies in a larger collaboration network. The distributed aspect of software development in open source projects stimulate the needs to understand different dimensions of global distributions .. These leads to the 2nd aspect in my phd in understanding the collaboration among organizations in global software development
- #5: Coordination activities do not directly produce outcomes, but is an important Let start with an example of coordination in developer daily life A software engineer planning to change one module in a computer system must first check if the changes will affect other modules and then arrange for any necessary changes to modules that will be affected; two engineers working on the same module must each be careful not to overwrite the other’s changes. Coordination is defined as a mechanism to manage technical dependencies among tasks and task holders. If this communication does not occur timely and sufficiently the development, there can be some impacts on team productivity and software quality. A lot of research and advanced collalboration technology has been done in GSD. However, there are still a lot of reports about coordination problems, espeically, Awareness of coordination needs and facilitation of suitable mechanisms are still major issues in DSD
- #6: While this figure express the socio technical view of coordination, most of research on this line make an assumption that the coordination occur in a homogeneous development environment. In practices, many software projects spread through many organizational units, that have their own objectives, expectations and decisions on development approaches. This occur in the context of outsourcing, off…. In the example in the previous slide a person worked with user interface and person worked with database might belongs to 2 different companies. Little has been known about inter-organizational team coordination
- #7: Espinosa proposed a framework to understand the impact of global boundaries on coordination and project outcomes. Although it has a brief discussion about the organizational boundaries, it is It is not clear in which ways organizational boundary impact the ability to coordinate software engineering tasks. Moreover, literature in DSD also reveal a little understanding about the adoption of coordination mechanisms to resolve specific software task dependencies.
- #10: In this presentation, firstly I will talk about the gap in research about coordination in global software development. And from this, I present the goal of my study and the research questions. After that, I will talk about the overview of 5 studies was conducted as part of this ph.d Then, is the contribution for both research and practice And finally I will talk about the limitation of my research and the opportuniries for future work
- #11: This timeline chart shows the temporal dimensions of these five studies. S1 was conducted as part of the ongoing research project on understanding OSS adoption practices in European software industry. S2 continued to investigate the interaction among companies participated in OSS projects from community perspective. The existence of boundaries among companies and contribution to community contributes to RQ1 from OSSD perspective. S3 synthesize literature in DSD about the impact of global boundaries on team coordination, provide the basic for further investigation of oganizational boundaries. And answer RQ2. S4 has two phases. At phase 1, the characteristics of organizational boundaries are identified. At phase 2, the study explores the role of boundary spanners as a coordination mechanism. This helps to answer RQ2 and RQ3 S5 was started in the time I went to Avaya for a research exchange period. The study focused on understanding the coordination problems in a multiple platform system and adoption of forking and configuration management systems to support cross boundary development. ----- Meeting Notes (7/4/15 14:19) ----- too much about oss, focus on what did you gain from each of these studies. tell about what is the results, for answer the RQs, ... we understand ...
- #12: Several empirical research methods have been used to address these questions. S1 adopts a qualitative survey of 25 European software companies. S2 explored mailing list and jira issues from three OSS projects S3 provided a sytematic review of 45 articles S4 performed case studies in 4 different DSD contexts S5 is an action research in a large telecommunication company. ----- Meeting Notes (7/4/15 14:19) ----- research methodology label or repository
- #13: The detail of data collection methods and data analysis shown in this Figure. Bias occurred when collecting qualitative data was tried to minimized by follow up interviews, confirmation of participants and per reviews of colleagues. We tried to adopt the triangulation by collecting data from as many data source as possible. Threats of collecting and analysis of quantitative data is reduced by pre processing of data, expert opinions and avoidance of causal-relationship conclusions. ----- Meeting Notes (7/4/15 14:19) ----- go fast cover quite different techniques of ...data collection and data analysis
- #14: One concern with my research is the evolution of the scope from open source to distributed software development, the refinement of the focus from collaboration in general to team coordination. However, all of the studies contributed to the same theme interorganizational collaboration. When combining the result from these studies, I have used thematic analysis to extract the parts of findings that is relevant the RQs.
- #15: For RQ1, the characteristics of collaboration among organizations are extracted in two context, Open source software projects and commercial projects. From OSS community perspective, I found a signficant. The resolution time of issues among key companies, peripheral companies and volunteer are not statistically different. From commcerial companies. There is one way interaction between companies and oss communities… OSS components are adopted with little adjustment
- #16: For RQ2, a conceptual framework of organizational boundaries has been emerged from literature and refine by case studies in four different DSD contexts. Organizational boundaries can influence the team coordination in 4 ways, First, the general collaboration policy towards the other partner might impact the collaboration attitude. For instance, … team structure across boundaries is not always match with code submission and forking structure, and increase the coordination needs. Third, the mismatch of engineering process among companies, such as development approach or different development infrastructure inhibits some coordination mechanisms. Lastly, the different in coding, testing and refactoring will introduce the different expectation about work quality across boundaries.
- #19: For RQ3, two particular coordination mechanisms have emerged from interviews, which are boundary spanner and features of configuration management systems. Boundary spanners are individual who link internal network with external source of knowledge and information. Four general type of activities need to be performed to support cross boundary coordination, which are … The list of activities are slightly different due to whether the commercial … For instance, …
- #20: The second mechanism is to adopt configuration management systems, in the S5, we addressed the feature of cloning MRs in JIRA. The feature is integrated in the process of reviewing MRs to propagate the duplication of issues to relevant teams. At the current stage the identification of dependent task is done manually. JIRA software is introducing the update to support the automated identification of these dependencies. In study 5 we also reveal the four different ways to adopt forking across project boundaries. One of them was to avoid coordination overload by temporize the coordination needs to the later phases.
- #22: Researcher about OSS integration can have a up+to+date view of adoption of OSS in industry. Our study confirms the previous studies about … Researcher in GSD area often see mixed or conflicted report about impact of global boundaries on project outcomes. Our study provide a systematic map of the impacts and draw some conclusions. Researcher about socio technical coordination can benefit from this work by introducing organizational dimension. A possible application is to introduce weight value for coordination needs that goes within or across the boundaries. Researcher about information system can see a application of in practice boundary spanner in the area of dsd. And last, we explored the new type of dependencies, which are duplicate dependencies and study the multiple platform development. At the time we conducted study S5, there is no empirical study about multiple platform … With the emerge of web and mobile development, this line of research is directly contributed to software industry. ----- Meeting Notes (7/4/15 14:19) ----- we need new insights ... how reflective you are ... to be honest: if you dont know say dont know ... DISCUSSION IMPLICATION TO RESEARCH 1. put up some things can be studied 2. contribution list but not what is important for the research what i have done mean for research TAKE OUT THE PAPER SEE THE ENGLISH AGAIN
- #27: Comments Introduction part . Motivation : more practical problems, specific individual ….