Coordination 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. / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/3451 |
| Date | 15 August 2011 |
| Creators | Kwan, Irwin Hin-Bong |
| Contributors | Damian, Daniela |
| Source Sets | University of Victoria |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | Available to the World Wide Web |
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