Leveraging Task Contexts for Managing Developers’ Coordination

We introduce a new method for determining work dependencies that are antecedents to coordination requirements among members of a software development organization. Our method leverages records of individual activity associated with development tasks, sometimes called task context, which can be collected by monitoring the actions carried out by a developer during work sessions within her development environment. We describe an algorithm that measures similarity between task contexts and produces a measure of closeness between the corresponding developers. By means of a field study on an open source project that routinely records task context data, we show how the closeness relationship accurately determines the same coordination requirements detected using traditional methods. Our method also provides a temporal advantage, since it uses “live” instead of historical data. We explain how these findings make coordination requirements actionable for management-, designand team-related decisions as the development work is underway. This moves research in this area from post-mortem analysis to proactive detection of coordination requirements.