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Modeling a Global Software Development Project as a Complex Socio-Technical System to Facilitate Risk

Management and Improve the Project Structure?

Ilia Bider, Henning Otto

10th IEEE International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE)

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The goal of our research project

Propose a technique for modeling a distributed software development project as a system to be used for: • Identifying places in the project with a potential risk

• Discussing and designing the ways of mitigating the risks

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Plan of presentation

1. Knowledge base

2. Combining components of knowledge based use in a new modeling technique

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Knowledge base used

1. Own experience from software development2. Socio-technical systems theory3. Functional decomposition of an organization (e.g.

IDEF0)4. Theory of distances (geographical, temporal, etc.)5. Step-relationship modeling technique for business

processes6. Two case studies of GSD projects at a large ICT

provider

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1. Own experience: about me• For most of my life: Practitioner + Researcher in IT related fields• At the end settling down in academia to reflect on and pass to

others my experience• Experienced in software development projects

– Including requirements engineering, software development, introducing IT in organizations

– big and small, non-agile and agile, successful and unsuccessful

– In different capacities, such as a programmer, group leader, consultant, bug fixer, technical project manager

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1. Own Experience: our team

• Bogumila Rutkowska – a project manager from the ICT provider and her team

• Thanos Karapantelakis – a researcher and PhD student from the ICT provider

• Two MS students from SU (Department of Computer and Systems Sciences)– Henning Otto (project modeling)– Saga Willysson (model visualization)

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2. Socio-technical systems

Tasks

TechnologyStructure

People

Soc

ial

Tech

nica

l

Adopted from: R. P. Bostrom and J. S Heinen, "MIS problems and failures: A socio-technical perspective," MIS Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 17-32, 1977.

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3. Functional decomposition

IDEF0 – a most popular notation for functional decomposition

Block diagrams – the simplest notation

Connecting outputs to inputs: output/input relationships

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3. Functional decompositionSoftware project

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4. Distances1. Geographical

2. Time zone (in addition to 1)

3. Organizational (independent from 1 & 2)

4. Professional (independent from 1, 2, 3)

5. Cultural (in addition to 1or/and 3 or and 4)

Distances can exists between • The members of a team• The teams themselves (even when teams are homogenous)

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5. Step-relationship modeling of business processes

Goal with the step-relationship modeling technique:

• Discover essential properties of a business process without going into too many details

• Enough to derive requirements on capabilities of IT-tools that would provide satisfactory support for people engaged in the process

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5. Step-relationship modelingMain notions of modeling technique:• Step (phase, work package) a unit of work; a model includes a

small number of steps 5-10• Relationships between the steps of different kinds, e.g.

output/input, parallel execution, etc.

Relationships can be presented • graphically; easy to understand • In the form of orthogonal matrixes; these could be manipulated

formally

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6. Two GSD projects at a large ICT provider

Who has completed a transition from:• a traditional phase-based development approach with local

software development teams

To• working in an iterative manner using the Scrum project

management methodology and employing geographically distributed teams

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6. The second GSD project

• Four different locations distributed across four countries(Three in Europe and one in Asia)

• Different types of organizations involved(Main organization, subdivision and subcontractors)

• Different types of professions involved(Management, technical design staff, test engineers)

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Plan of presentation

1. Knowledge base

2. Combining components of knowledge based use in a new modeling technique

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Software project – simplified model

Starting with functional decomposition

Is having output/input relationships enough?

Only if the same team do the job in all components

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The work of feedback controller manned by humans

Adding feedback connections

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Functional decomposition with feedback

Is adding feedback enough?

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Risks in GSD projects

1. Absence or deficiency of feedback connections

2. Parallel dependencies between functional components

3. Heterogeneous teams4. Distances between the teams

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Mitigating the risks

1. Through social structure, e.g. intersecting teams

2. Through technical infrastructure, e.g. systems/tools that support teams and communication between them

3. Through a combination of both

Need to represent the risks and ways of mitigating them in the model

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Representing distances inside

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Composite view: teams intersection

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Composite view: example 2

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Parallel execution - graphical form

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Parallel execution – matrix form

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End of presentationAdditional reading:1. Proceedings of this conference

2. I. Bider, A. Karapantelakis, and N. Khadka, "Building a High-Level Process Model for Soliciting Requirements on Software Tools to Support Software Development: Experience Report," in Short Paper Proceedings of the 6th IFIP WG 8.1 Working Conference on the Practice of Enterprise Modeling (PoEM 2013). CEUR, Vol. 1023, Riga, Latvia, 2013, pp. 70-82. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1023/paper7.pdf

3. I. Bider and E Perjons, "Design science in action: developing a modeling technique for eliciting requirements on business process management (BPM) tools," Software & Systems Modeling, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10270-014-0412-6, 2014.

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Q & A

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Contact: ilia@{dsv.su|ibissoft}.se