Knowledge Location, Differentiation, Credibility and Coordination in Open Source Software Development Teams

A number of high-quality, large-scale, complex software systems, such as Linux, Apache, and Perl, have been successfully produced through the open source software (OSS) paradigm. This fact suggests that effective knowledge coordination must exist within some OSS teams. However, very few studies have attempted to explicate what these coordination mechanisms are. Therefore, this study examines how knowledge is coordinated between the members of an OSS team from the transactive memory system (TMS) perspective. Specifically, we investigate 1) the relation between TMS and the team members’ knowledge coordination behaviors, and 2) the relation between knowledge coordination and the team’s performance. By surveying 61 OSS project teams, the study validates the important role that TMS plays in OSS developers’ knowledge coordination behaviors, which, in turn, have positive influence on their projects’ technical achievement

Software Development Team Dynamics: Control, Coordination, and Secure Software

In secure software has resulted of millions of dollars of company’s revenue as complex organizational systems are often software intensive. Researchers are still interested in the impact of the people involved, the process used and the project characteristics. This study looks at the security awareness and maturity level of those involved in the development process coupled with the management of the process to identify factors that lead to enhanced secure software development. Following a survey of prior literature, it is hypothesized that software development team members’ security awareness and maturity affect the design of software in a distributed context. Due to the nature of work of distributed team members, the relationship between team security awareness and maturity coordination on secure software design are also posited to be impacted by control types and coordination mechanisms. We contribute to literature by expanding the understanding of the process of creating secure software

An Overview of Event-based Facades for Modular Composition and Coordination of Multiple Applications

Complex software systems are usually developed as systems of systems (SoS’s) in which multiple constituent applications are composed and coordinated to fulfill desired system-level requirements. The constituent applications must be augmented with suitable coordination-specific interfaces, through which they can participate in coordinated interactions. Such interfaces as well as coordination rules have a crosscutting nature. Therefore, to increase the reusability of the applications and to increase the comprehensibility of SoS’s, suitable mechanisms are required to modularize the coordination rules and interfaces from the constituent applications. We introduce a new abstraction named as architectural event modules (AEMs), which facilitate defining constituent applications and desired coordination rules as modules of SoS’s. AEMs augment the constituent applications with event-based facades to let them participate in coordinated interactions. We introduce the EventArch language in which the concept of AEMs is implemented, and illustrate its suitability using a case study

Low Latency Reliable Data Sharing Mechanism for UAV Swarm Missions

The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms is increasing in many commercial applications as well as military applications (such as reconnaissance missions, search and rescue missions). Autonomous UAV swarm systems rely on multi-node interhost communication, which is used in coordination for complex tasks. Reliability and low latency in data transfer play an important role in the maintenance of UAV coordination for these tasks. In these applications, the control of UAVs is performed by autonomous software and any failure in data reception may have catastrophic consequences. On the other hand, there are lots of factors that affect communication link performance such as path loss, interference, etc. in communication technology (WIFI, 5G, etc.), transport layer protocol, network topology, and so on. Therefore, the necessity of reliable and low latency data sharing mechanisms among UAVs comes into prominence gradually. This paper examines available middleware solutions, transport layer protocols, and data serialization formats. Based on evaluation results, this research proposes a middleware concept for mobile wireless networks like UAV swarm systems

Coordinating Knowledge Work in Multi-Team Programs: Findings from a Large-Scale Agile Development Program

Software development projects have undergone remarkable changes with the arrival of agile development methods. While intended for small, self-managing teams, these methods are increasingly used also for large development programs. A major challenge in programs is to coordinate the work of many teams, due to high uncertainty in tasks, a high degree of interdependence between tasks and because of the large number of people involved. This revelatory case study focuses on how knowledge work is coordinated in large-scale agile development programs by providing a rich description of the coordination practices used and how these practices change over time in a four year development program with 12 development teams. The main findings highlight the role of coordination modes based on feedback, the use of a number of mechanisms far beyond what is described in practitioner advice, and finally how coordination practices change over time. The findings are important to improve the outcome of large knowledge-based development programs by tailoring coordination practices to needs and ensuring adjustment over time.Comment: To appear in Project Management Journa

IT Project Management from a Systems Thinking Perspective: A Position Paper

We proposes a Systems Thinking approach to the study of IT project management and show how this approach helps project managers in controlling their projects. To illustrate our proposal, we present an example model of the dynamics of IT out-sourcing projects. The example model explains these dynamics in terms of feedback loops consisting of causal relations re-ported in the literature. The model provides insight in how coordination, trust, information exchange and possibilities for op-portunistic behaviour influence each other and together influence delivery quality, which in turn influences trust. The integra-tion of these insights provided by applying the Systems Thinking perspective helps project managers to reason about how their choices influence project outcome. The Systems Thinking perspective can serve as an additional tool in the academic study of IT project management. Applying the Systems Thinking perspective also calls for additional research in which this perspective is itself the object of study

Information Technology as Coordination Infrastructure

Business information technology is traditionally viewed as information provision technology. In this view, organizations use their IT to implement databases that provide people with information when they want it. This view is persistent even though information provision is never an end in itself but always has the further purpose to support the coordination of activities of people. The role if IT as coordination technology became more prominent in the 1980s with the advent of network technology, that allowed activities across different businesses to be coordinated. This trend has accellerated since the growth of Internet usage, and today IT is used to support an increasingly varied range of processes performed by a variety of partners that do not all have a hierarchical relation to each other. This makes it difficult to analyze requirements for IT support and specify IT solutions: Business processes may not be well-defined, and interests of different businesses may clash. This report argues that to deal with this in requirements engineering and IT solution specification, business information technology should not be viewed as IT support for business processes but as IT support for the coordination of activities in one or more businesses. We will identify three basic coordination mechanisms, namely coordination by price, by management, and by shared norms, and for each of these mechanisms, we will identify requirements for IT support. The advent of flexible and standardized networking technology has facilitated the creation of novel coordination mechanisms within these three general paradigms, and we will give an inventory of generalized coordination mechanisms made possible by current IT. Finally, we will draw conclusions for requirements engineering methods for IT support for each of the coordination mechanisms identified by the framework

Coordination Implications of Software Coupling in Open Source Projects

The effect of software coupling on the quality of software has been studied quite widely since the seminal paper on software modularity by Parnas [1]. However, the effect of the increase in software coupling on the coordination of the developers has not been researched as much. In commercial software development environments there normally are coordination mechanisms in place to manage the coordination requirements due to software dependencies. But, in the case of Open Source software such coordination mechanisms are harder to implement, as the developers tend to rely solely on electronic means of communication. Hence, an understanding of the changing coordination requirements is essential to the management of an Open Source project. In this paper we study the effect of changes in software coupling on the coordination requirements in a case study of a popular Open Source project called JBoss

Collaborative design : managing task interdependencies and multiple perspectives

This paper focuses on two characteristics of collaborative design with respect to cooperative work: the importance of work interdependencies linked to the nature of design problems; and the fundamental function of design cooperative work arrangement which is the confrontation and combination of perspectives. These two intrinsic characteristics of the design work stress specific cooperative processes: coordination processes in order to manage task interdependencies, establishment of common ground and negotiation mechanisms in order to manage the integration of multiple perspectives in design