The coworkers should be maintained so as to develop a better and perform fast processing. Task dependencies refer to a matrix which keep into account which all task are dependent on what all tasks. It states the dependencies between various task. task dependencies to monitor the coordination in the project. Coordination is required between team members also which can be monitored using the task dependencies. a method that could be used to design tools for coordination which will focus mainly on collaboration and awareness. congruence as the measure of the fit. Measuring the congruence can indicate the speed and efficiency of the work. Also it can be used to reduce the amount of time required to perform the tasks.
Coordination Requirements and congruence are used to monitor the coordination.Coordination requirements indicate the amount of coordination that is requirement and between which all developers. In GSD coordination requirements change rapidly and also because of social and cultural differences. The coordination requirements indicates the interdependencies between the task and also between the developers. The paper aims at determining how the coordination requirement change over time GSD involves a large number of developers, which are grouped into teams and they work parallel on different modules. The dependencies between these modules change with time and also the developers interact with different developers as time goes by .The method to indicate the dependencies and the interaction of the developers is very useful for the GSD projects. The paper presents the result on data collected from a data storage industry for three years of development activity and first four releases of the product. The unit of analysis used is modification request (MR) , which is the change request that comes from the developers or the customers after the code freeze phase. When MR is the change that is made to the existing system. The method used to coordinate between teams in the project were the Internet Relay Chat(IRC) and MR tracking system. Measuring coordination requirements require two matrices . The two matrices are the task assignment matrix which indicates which member is assigned which task and the task dependencies matrix which indicates which task is dependent on which task. That is the interdependencies of task is given by task dependencies matrix. Task Assignment matrix is multiplied to task dependencies matrix to give the set of task a particular member should be aware of. Now this matrix so obtained is multiplied by the transpose of task assignment matrix which indicates (cell ij) the extend to which member i works on tasks that share dependencies with the tasks worked on by member j. This gives the coordination requirements . The coordination requirement matrix was build by taking the information from the MR reports. The paper discusses the stability of the coordination requirements. The coordination requirements were calculated for every week and plotted.It was observed that the coordination requirements were very volatile in nature and no pattern was observed. Coordination requirements are highly unstable and change dynamically. This indicates that the extend to which to members will need to coordinate with each other is dynamic in nature and can not be predicted easily.
Congruence indicates the proportion to which the coordination requirements were satisfied. Higher the congruence , more accurate the predicted coordination between requirements were achieved. Congruence can be measured by comparing the actual coordination requuirements with the coordination requirements. The actual coordination matrix indicates the coordination that took place. If in coordination requirement matrix it was indicated that 20 pairs should coordinate and in actual coordination matrix only 4 pairs coordinated then , the congruence is (4/20) that is 0.25. The congruence value will always lie between the 0 and 1. The actual coordination matrix was constructed using the four congruence. They are
• Structural congruence : In this actual coordination matrix is build between those members that belong to the same team
• Geographical congruence: In this the actual coordination matrix is build between those teams that belong to the same location. If the congruence value so obtained from this matrix is high , it indicates the coordination is required in the same site and less coordination is required across sites.
• MR communication congruence : In this the actual coordination matrix is build between those members that were the part of the MR. That is they commented on the MR report.
• IRC communication congruence : In this the actual coordination matrix is build between those members who interacted on the IRC . This information is fetched through the IRC logs.
The impact of congruence on task performance was measured using the above four congruence and other measures . To measure task performance the correlation of the above four congruence measure and other measures with the resolution time was calculated. Resolution time indicates the time required to solve a MR . Using the previous year data , the mean , standard deviation , minimum value and maximum values which are needed to normalize the data , skew and kurtosis measures that indicate the bias in the values were recorded in the table. The table list few measures which are as below
• Dependency : This gives the number of modification requests that the main modification request depends on.
• Priority : The MRs were assigned the priority , which range between 1 to 5 , where 5 indicated the highest priority and 1 the lowest.
• Task reassignment : It indicates the number of times an MR was re-assigned to a different engineer or team.
• Release : It identifies the release of the product that the modification request is associated with.
• Change size : It indicates the number of files that were modified as part of the change for the main/focal MR .
• Programming Experience : It indicates the average number of years of programming experience prior to joining the company of all the engineers involved in the modification request.
• Tenure : It indicates the average number of months in the company of all the engineers that worked in the modification request at the time the work associated with the MR was completed.
• Component experience: It indicates the average number of times that the developers responsible for the modification request have worked on the same files affected by the focal modification request.
• Team load : It indicates the average work load of the teams responsible for the components associated with the modification request.
The regression was calculated to using adjusted square mean, and results on the how congruence effect the task performance were drawn. It was found that if the task performance was directly proportional to the structural congruence. Which means that if the task is performed by the members belonging to the same team, task performance increases.
Also that as the geographical congruence increases that is task is performed by members belonging to same site , the time taken to resolve a modification request will decrease , that is increased task performance.
Change in congruence with time .All congruence measures were taken for all the releases and plotted. The coordination requirements for a n weeks were compared with the actual coordination for n-1 weeks , one week was given for discussion. The graph was plotted for all the releases and it was noticed that structural congruence decreases with releases whereas geographical congruence remains kind of same for all the releases. MR congruence and IRC congruence value increases with releases. This indicates as newer releases of the product are made , more and more coordination is required over MR and IRC channel.
The number of developers making the half amount of changes were computed and it was observed only 18 developers out of around 90 developers did 50% of the changes. Hence they divided the developers into two groups. Group 1 containing 18 top developers and Group 2 containing rest of the developers. It was observed that the group 1 developers coordinated or interacted more on IRC and MR congruence with releases whereas the developers belonging to group 2 interacted relatively less as compared to Group 1 on MR congruence and IRC . This shows that large number of developers consist of a set of developers that actively interact with releases and rest remain less interactive.
As discussed earlier the coordination requirements change with time and are highly unstable.future research on how can we monitor the nature of change of coordination requirement and discover a pattern that it follows. The technique discussed is useful to design collaborative tools and awareness tools. Tools like TeamSCOPE , TUKAN and Palantir can be enchanced by making use of the congruence measures . The tools like TeamSCOPE can be enchanced by using the concept and technique to measure task dependencies .discussed various techniques that can be used to enchance or develop various collaboration and awareness tools. It provides effective technique to monitor the coordination between sites and hence improve the task performance and speed . also shows various relationships like the amount of interaction among developers belonging to same team or same location or using same communication medium over time. The congruence is used to measure task performance and the coordination. Also the number of developers that actively participate in the development of the project over time is also shown.
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