ISR Presents

Identifying Coordination Gaps in Software Development Teams
 
Mary E. Helander, Ph.D.
Math Scientist, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY 

Wednesday, June 27, 2007 - 4pm - NSH 1507

Abstract:
Software development projects are often fraught with problems which
can be traced to poor alignment between the team communication and the
software structure. In this talk, extensions to the methodology of
Cataldo, Wangstrom, Herbsleb and Carley (CSCW'2006), for identifying
coordination requirements, are presented and discussed.  We formalize
the coordination requirement identification problem, and present an
efficient graph theoretical algorithm for computing congruence based
on an extended set of reference patterns.  We show how the steps of
the algorithm are useful for enumerating coordination gaps in the
social network, which flag potential communication issues.  Analytics
relating the importance and rank of social links and joins (i.e. arcs
connecting social and technical networks), are developed.  While gap
identification allows for automating possible corrective steps, link
importance measurements help to prioritize and enable optimization of
communication gap correction.   Finally, we'll present implications of
the approach for improving the performance of software development
teams.

This is joint work with:
Kate Ehrlich, IBM Research, Cambridge MA; Giuseppe Valetto, IBM
Research, Hawthorne NY; Sarah McAllister, IBM Research, Yorktown
Heights, NY and Clay Williams, IBM Research, Hawthorne NY


Bio:
Dr. Mary Helander is Math Scientist at IBM's T.J. Watson Research
Center. Her current research involves the development of social
network analytics and algorithms to solve business problems related to
information and communication networks of people. Mary has more than
20 years of combined industry and academic experience in operations
research, optimal network and transportation planning, software
engineering and supply chain management. Prior to work at IBM, Mary
was the Director of the Applied Software Engineering Lab at Linköping
University in Sweden, where she was a faculty member of the Computer
and Information Science Department and a Research Fellow with the
Department of Mechanical Engineering / Quality Technology Group. Mary
earned a Bachelors degree in CIS and Mathematics from the State
University of New York at Potsdam, an M.S. in IE/OR from Syracuse
University, a Ph.D. in Operations Research from the University at
Buffalo, and a Docent in Quality Technology and Software Engineering
from Linköping University.