Challenges in Measuring, Understanding, and Achieving Social-Technical Congruence
Anita Sarma, Jim Herbsleb, André van der Hoek · 2008
Congruence, the state in which a software development organization harbors sufficient coordination capabilities to meet the coordination demands of the technical products under development, is increasingly recognized as critically important to the performance of an organization. To date, it has been shown that a variety of states of incongruence may exist in an organization, with possibly serious negative effects on product quality, development progress, cost, and so on. Exactly how to achieve congruence, or knowing what steps to take to achieve congruence, is less understood. In this paper, we introduce a series of key challenges that we believe must be comprehensively addressed in order for congruence research to result in wellunderstood approaches, tactics, and tools – so these can be infused in the day-to-day practices of development organizations to improve their coordination capabilities with better aligned social and technical structures. This effort is partially funded by the National Science Foundation under grant number IIS-0534775, IIS-0329090, and the Software Industry Center and its sponsors, particularly the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Effort also supported by a 2007 Jazz Faculty Grant. The views and conclusions are those of the authors