Post on 12-Jul-2015
transcript
1
Coordination of software development teams across organizational boundary – An
exploratory study
Anh, Nguyen Duc Daniela S. Cruzes
IDI, NTNU
08/13/14
2
Agenda
MotivationTheoretical backgroundResearch questionResearch methodologyResultsConclusions
08/13/14
3
Introduction• Global software development as a current
development paradigm
– Large companies have distributed branches: Microsoft, Google, Ericson, Phillips, Siemens …
– Whole offshoring industry
– Growth of Open source communities
08/13/14
4
Motivation• Coordinating development tasks in geographically
and organizationally distributed teams is a significant challenge in SE
– Coordination breakdowns were likely to occur at organizational boundaries (Curtis 1989)
• Little has been known about vendor-to-vendor relationship, such as team collaboration and competition
08/13/14
5
GSD – Systematic literature reviews
08/13/14
Context distribution in studies in GSD (Darja et al. 2010)
6
GSD – Systematic literature reviews
08/13/14
Context distribution in Studies on Coordination in GSD)
7
Organizational boundary
• Organizational boundary– Geographical dispersion
– Temporal dispersion
– Cultural dispersion
– Work process dispersion
– Organizational dispersion• Distances in regulations, goal, objectives in collaboration in
developing software between: partner companies, acquisition, commercial companies and OSS community
08/13/14
8
GSD – global dispersion dimensions
08/13/14
Espinosa et al. (2006)
9
Technical oordination
08/13/14
• coordination: activities required to maintain consistency within a work product or to manage dependencies within the workflow” (Malone et al. 1990)
• technical dependencies (Grinter et al. 1995):– Paralell development dependencies– Expertise dependencies – Integration Dependencies – Historical Dependencies– Interface Dependencies– Testing Dependencies– Shared code Dependencies
10
Coordination problems
08/13/14
11
Coordination mechanisms• Synchronization of main milestones
• Frequent deliveries
• Establishment of peer-to-peer links
• Early relationship building• Early architectural assignment• Shared management and development tool
• Boundary spanner
(Curtis 1988, Paasivaara et al. 2003, Cataldo et al. 2007, Whitehead et al. 2010)
08/13/14
12
Research questions
• RQ1: What are attributes of the organizational boundary that introduce challenges on team coordination in GSD?
• RQ2: What are the coordination mechanisms that help to mitigate organizational boundary?
08/13/14
Organizational boundary
Coordination problems
Project outcomes
Coordination mechanisms
13
Study design & context
08/13/14
14
Context 1:
08/13/14
Context•Market driven project•5 years old project•Search engine system•3 geographical locations in USA & Norway – 150 developers
Interdependency•Technical dependency•Temporal dependency•Process dependency
Coordination infrastructure•TFS, daily virtual meeting, teleconferencing, email•GIT, informal talk, frequent visit
15
Context 2:
08/13/14
Context•Outsourcing bespoken•5 years old project•Ship management system•3 geographical locations – 3 organizations within Norway- 13 developers
Interdependency•Technical dependency
Coordination mechanism•TFS, email, telephone conference, face to face meeting,
16
Interview 7:Developer 3
08/13/14
1985 1995 01/2013
Interview 2: Team leaderInterview 3: Developer 1Interview 4: Developer 2
Interview 10: Developer 1
Interview 5: Developer 3
Interview 9: Project
manager 2
2000
Interview 8: Program
manager 1
11/2011
Interview 1: Project manager
Interview 6:Team leader
Observation 1
Observation 2
Data collection & analysis
17
Data collection & analysis
08/13/14
Interview guide: 1.project and interviewee background2.general challenges when collaborating with others from distance3.specific problems related to organizational differences when working with other teams4.best practices when working with teams from other organizations Data analysis:
Identifying segments of
text
Coding concepts
Coding relationship
among concept
Concept categorization
Cross case comparison
18
Case 1: boundary• Customer governance policy• “… the product owners didn’t wish us to talk to [Team A2] …
This was based on the kind of suspicions that we, as two consultant companies, would make stuff up to make money.”
• Competition attitude• “Regarding to the organizational dimension, it is not a problem
with legal issues. But they do collaborate as competitors, so we need to keep the competition capability”
08/13/14
19
Case 1: boundary• Communication structure vs. source code structure
• Difference in development process• “…we work in such different ways so we don’t share work processes.
We communicated in a bit higher level than what we are doing now.
• Difference in adoption of CM and development tools• “TFS have a lot of features for these kinds of things. We tried it out and
we are kind of in another self-organizing way. We found it is too much bureaucracy for our way of working...”
08/13/14
20
Case 2: boundary• Conflict on task and responsibility• “We had so much to do that we tried to push the tasks in the borderline
between team. We tried to push it to other team”
• Different focus on quality vs. productivity
• Difference in code and test practices• “The new focus on quality was very difficult… We had to spend more
resources to have better quality in this case. Earlier we had a shorter last LOC developed to the release date. Now we have a longer time and an established test process.”
08/13/14
21
Conclusions
08/13/14
22
Conclusions
08/13/14
Collaboration policy
Team structure
Engineering process
Development practice
23
Conclusions
Team coordination mechanism Case A Case B
Establishment of peer to peer links X
Frequent deliveries XSynchronization of milestones XShared management and development tool X XEarly relationship building X XEarly architectural assignment XBoundary spanner X X
08/13/14
24
• Q&A?
08/13/14