The role of communication in team-based software engineering projects
Allen H. Dutoit · 1996
Several case studies in engineering design and software engineering have revealed that communication breakdowns are a major factor in throughput and quality. Misunderstandings (e.g., terminology clashes), delays (e.g., important decisions communicated too late) and omissions (e.g., misdirected communication; reference to relevant information omitted or not followed) were the main classes of problems discovered. Moreover, recovering from such breakdowns often represented a large overhead, thus resulting in a significant drop in productivity and contributing to system development risks. Metrics applied to those case studies have proved to be useful in understanding general communication and productivity issues. In some cases, they enabled specific problems in the engineering processes to be identified, thus demonstrating the value of metrics and other instrumentation for process improvement. However, the infrastructure and the resources needed for applying such metrics often prevents their use for identifying problems in time to address them as they occur. Consequently, both the monitoring of the development process and the improvement of the engineering process are hampered. There is a need for improved monitoring of the development process. This research proposes solutions to both problems. First, an issue-based model for organizing, conducting, and capturing meetings in team-based projects is presented. Second, a statistical evaluation of measures of electronic communication traffic using natural language processing is proposed. Finally, the evaluation of the impact of the issue-based model on communication and outcome of a team-based software engineering project are described.