Using Development Experience to Calculate Congruence

Coordination congruence has been defined as the match between coordination requirements and the actual coordination behavior of a team, where requirements are calculated based on underlying task dependencies and behavior based on communication patterns. In this paper we propose to expand the notion of congruence in two distinct ways. First, we use the concept of shared mental model as a determinant of coordination behavior, where shared mental model is defined as the common conceptualization of artifacts, tasks, and team members shared among developers who have worked together in the past. Second, we create a measure of expertise congruence that determines the match between the expertise that is required and that which is allocated to a project. We also present some issues that need careful investigation as we expand the notion of congruence.