Guest Editors' Introduction: Special Section on the Socio-Technical Environment of Software Development Projects

S OFTWARE engineering has long been recognized as a human activity that is managed through a system of methods, tools, processes, and work practices. This interaction between the nature of the product, the work, and the people doing it represents the socio-technical environment of a software development project. Software projects that fail to adequately consider the people's social behavior in the context of the product and the work are less likely to be successful [2], [3]. The negative consequences of a neglected socio-technical environment are even more evident in geographically distributed software development, a project setting that has become commonplace in the last few decades. A growing body of research has adopted the socio-technical perspective. However, the research is currently dispersed across multiple venues, including computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), computer-human interaction (CHI), software engineering, and organizational theory and behavior. As a first attempt to integrate these strands of research for software engineering, we organized workshops at ICSE 2008 and ICSE 2009. This special section builds on the success of those workshops and highlights emerging and promising lines of research that have the potential to shape future research and practice in software engineering. The socio-technical perspective has proven especially enlightening in revealing issues that affect coordination, awareness, and their consequences within software teams [1], [3], [4]. In particular, socio-technical congruence examines the match between the coordination requirements established by the dependencies among tasks and the actual coordination activities carried out by the engineers. Socio-technical congruence provides the theoretical grounding and a methodological framework for studying a range of questions related to communication, coordination, awareness , and collaboration in a wide range of software development settings. In the first paper, entitled " Does extend the socio-technical congruence approach to study the implications of coordination gaps on the success of software integration tasks. The authors studied the IBM Rational Jazz collaboration platform, 1 which involved 151 individuals distributed across seven development sites. Their analyses examined the mapping between the technical dependencies associated with development tasks and the communication patterns among project members. They established that the link between socio-technical congruence and lack of failures in software builds was contingent on the type of software build task under consideration. In addition, their results provide insight into the complexity of the theoretical relationship between dependencies, coordination , and software development outcomes. For example, in this particular setting and under particular situations, higher levels of congruence …