Communication is not always effective. In fact, there are many kinds of communication that are highly problematic in software engineering teams. For example, Perlow (1999) conducted an ethnography of one team and found a highly dysfunctional use of interruptions in which the most expert members of a team were constantly interrupted to "fight fires" (immediately address critical problems) in other parts of the organization, and then the organization rewarded them for their heroics. This not only made the most expert engineers less productive, but it also disincentivized the rest of the organization to find effective ways of preventing the disasters from occurring in the first place. Not all interruptions are bad, and they can increase productivity, but they do increase stress (Mark et al. 2008).
-Communication isn't just about transmitting information; it's also about relationships and identity. For example, the dominant culture of many software engineering work environments—and even the perceived culture—is one that can deter many people from even pursuing careers in computer science. Modern work environments are still dominated by men, who speak loudly, out of turn, and disrespectfully, with some even bordering on sexual harassment. These are not the conditions for trusting, effective communication.
+Communication isn't just about transmitting information; it's also about relationships and identity. For example, the dominant culture of many software engineering work environments—and even the perceived culture—is one that can deter many people from even pursuing careers in computer science. Modern work environments are still dominated by men, who speak loudly, out of turn, and disrespectfully, with some even bordering on sexual harassment. Similarly, software developers often have to work with people in other domains such as artists, content developers, data scientists, design researchers, designers, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, product planners, program managers, and service engineers. One study found that developers' cross-disciplinary collaborations with people in these other domains required open-mindedness about the input of others, proactively informing everyone about code-related constraints, and ultimately seeing the broader picture of how pieces from different disciplines fit together; when developers didn't do these things, collaborations failed, and therefore projects failed (Li et al. 2017). These are not the conditions for trusting, effective communication.
When communication is effective, it still takes time. One of the key strategies for reducing the amount of communication necessary is knowledge sharing tools, which broadly refers to any information system that stores facts that developers would normally have to retrieve from a person. By storing them in a database and making them easy to search, teams can avoid interruptions. The most common knowledge sharing tools in software teams are issue trackers, which are often at the center of communication not only between developers, but also with every other part of a software organization (Bertram et al. 2010). Community portals, such as GitHub pages or Slack teams, can also be effective ways of sharing documents and archiving decisions (Treude & Storey 2011). Perhaps the most popular knowledge sharing tool in software engineering today is Stack Overflow, which archives facts about programming language and API usage.
@@ -59,6 +59,7 @@Torgeir Dingsøyr and Emil Røyrvik. 2003. An empirical study of an informal knowledge repository in a medium-sized software consulting company. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE '03). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 84-92.
Matthieu Foucault, Marc Palyart, Xavier Blanc, Gail C. Murphy, and Jean-Rémy Falleri. 2015. Impact of developer turnover on quality in open-source software. In Proceedings of the 2015 10th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2015). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 829-841.
Andrew J. Ko, Robert DeLine, and Gina Venolia. 2007. Information Needs in Collocated Software Development Teams. In Proceedings of the 29th international conference on Software Engineering (ICSE '07). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 344-353.
+Li, P. L., Ko, A. J., & Begel, A. (2017, May). Cross-disciplinary perspectives on collaborations with software engineers. In Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (pp. 2-8).
Mark, G., Gudith, D., & Klocke, U. (2008, April). The cost of interrupted work: more speed and stress. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 107-110).
Audris Mockus. 2010. Organizational volatility and its effects on software defects. In Proceedings of the eighteenth ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering (FSE '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 117-126.
Audris Mockus and James D. Herbsleb. 2002. Expertise browser: a quantitative approach to identifying expertise. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE '02). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 503-512.