Reducing the Cost of Communication and Coordination in Distributed Software Development

• Published in: Software Engineering Approaches for Offshore and Outsourced Development pp. 152 - 169
• Main Authors: Ye, Yunwen, Nakakoji, Kumiyo, Yamamoto, Yasuhiro
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin, Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: attention cost; cost of communication and coordination; distributed software development; knowledge collaboration
• ISBN: 3540755411; 9783540755418
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-75542-5_13

Decades of software engineering research have tried to reduce the interdependency of source code to make parallel development possible. However, code remains helplessly interlinked and software development requires frequent formal and informal communication and coordination among software developers. Communication and coordination cost still dominates the cost of software development. When the development team is separated by oceans, the cost of communication and coordination increases dramatically. To better understand the cost of communication and coordination in software development, this paper proposes to conceptualize software as a knowledge ecosystem that consists of three interlinked elements: code, documents, and developers. This conceptualization enables us to understand and pinpoint the social dependency of developers created by the code dependency. We show that a better understanding of the social dependency would increase the economic use of the collective attention of software developers with a proposed new communication mechanism that frees developers from the overload of communication that does not interest them, and thus reduces the overall cost of communication and coordination in software development.