Date: Oct 2nd, 2008
Room: DMP 310
Speaker: Jim Herbsleb
Title: Coordination in Global Development

Abstract:

Coordination is a key issue in any large, distributed software development project. Developers and teams need to manage the complex and often changing dependencies among their engineering decisions. The design of the software architecture largely dictates who needs to coordinate with whom, and about what, in order to accomplish the design and development work of the components and connectors defined in the architecture. Yet architectural decisions are generally made with only limited knowledge of the coordination requirements these decisions place on development teams. It is currently very difficult to predict whether teams' capacity to coordinate their activities will be sufficient to carry out the work without significant delays or quality problems. In this talk, I will describe research in which we are developing ways to identify coordination requirements, understand how needed information flows through a project, and develop tactics for bringing coordination requirements into line with coordination capacity.