Communication, team performance, and the individual: Bridging technical dependencies

Abstract

Many software development projects fail, often one of the major factors is poor communication between individuals on the development team. However, improving coordination in software engineering requires more than just increasing communication among developers. The sociotechnical congruence (STC) metric helps to make sense out of complicated the highly-dynamic task dependencies between software developers by analyzing the relationship between developer communication and task dependencies obtained from software artifacts. Previous unreplicated research computed STC from data contained in software repositories and showed that high values of STC in a commercial software engineering setting led to higher team performance, but did not differentiate cleanly between the effects of aligned communication and the effects of general communication. In this work we utilize software repository data from an Open Source software community to evaluate STC in a very different setting. We then extend STC, creating an individual metric and two sub-measures that distinguish between communication that is aligned with task dependencies and general communication, and show that general communication has little benefit, while communication aligned with our measure of task dependencies reduces bug resolution time.