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Effecting change: coordination in large-scale software development

Published: 13 May 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Large-scale software development requires coordination within and between very large engineering teams, each of which may be located in different locations and time zones. Numerous studies, and indeed, a whole conference (ICGSE), are dedicated to discovering the causes of problems with distributed development in the software industry. Microsoft has long had product teams too large to be considered co-located, even when sitting in neighboring buildings on the same campus. Recently, it has been expanding its engineering workforce into India and China, and our research is showing that Microsoft is encountering many of the coordination problems that go along with differences of location, time zone, and culture. As we go forward, our research has been changing from learning about the problem to experimenting with solutions. What are the best practices for improving coordination? Can they be applied to all software teams? How does one move past simple readings of research results towards effective intervention?

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHASE '08: Proceedings of the 2008 international workshop on Cooperative and human aspects of software engineering
May 2008
120 pages
ISBN:9781605580395
DOI:10.1145/1370114
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 13 May 2008

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  1. coordination
  2. distributed development

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ICSE '08
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CHASE '08 Paper Acceptance Rate 28 of 34 submissions, 82%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 47 of 70 submissions, 67%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2021)Understanding Accessibility and Collaboration in Programming for People with Visual ImpairmentsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34492035:CSCW1(1-30)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2021
  • (2020)How do Data Science Workers Collaborate? Roles, Workflows, and ToolsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/33928264:CSCW1(1-23)Online publication date: 29-May-2020
  • (2019)How Data Scientists Use Computational Notebooks for Real-Time CollaborationProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/33591413:CSCW(1-30)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2019
  • (2014)Factors affecting team evolution during software projectsProceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering10.1145/2593702.2593715(16-23)Online publication date: 2-Jun-2014
  • (2013)Emergence of developer teams in the collaboration network2013 6th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE)10.1109/CHASE.2013.6614729(33-40)Online publication date: May-2013
  • (2012)On the perceived interdependence and information sharing inhibitions of enterprise software engineersProceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work10.1145/2145204.2145403(1337-1346)Online publication date: 11-Feb-2012
  • (2010)Ad-hoc leadership in agile software development environmentsProceedings of the 2010 ICSE Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering10.1145/1833310.1833316(32-38)Online publication date: 2-May-2010
  • (2010)Keeping up with your friendsProceedings of the 1st Workshop on Web 2.0 for Software Engineering10.1145/1809198.1809205(20-23)Online publication date: 4-May-2010
  • (2010)From Program Comprehension to People ComprehensionProceedings of the 2010 IEEE 18th International Conference on Program Comprehension10.1109/ICPC.2010.42(190-191)Online publication date: 30-Jun-2010

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