COMMUNICATION, TEAM PERFORMANCE, AND THE INDIVIDUAL: BRIDGING TECHNICAL DEPENDENCIES.
Patrick Wagstrom, James D. Herbsleb, Kathleen M. Carley · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2010
Failure of software development projects is common. Often one of the major factors is poor communication between individuals on the development team. However, improving coordination requires more than just increasing communication. The Socio-Technical Congruence (STC) metric helps make sense out of the complicated highly-dynamic coordination requirements between team members by analyzing the relationship between communication and task dependencies obtained from work artifacts (Cataldo, Herbsleb, & Carley, 2008). Previous research computed STC from data contained in software repositories and found that high values of STC in a commercial software engineering setting led to higher team performance (Cataldo, Wagstrom, Herbsleb, & Carley, 2006), but did not differentiate cleanly between the effects of communication aligned with coordination requirements and that which was not. In this work we extend STC, creating an individual metric and two sub-measures that distinguish between communication that is aligned with coordination requirements, which we find has a highly beneficial effect, and that which is not aligned.