Mapping Social Network to Software Architecture to Detect Structure Clashes in Agile Software Development

Software development is rarely an individual effort and generally involves teams of developers collaborating together in order to generate reliable code. Such collaborations require proper communication and regular coordination among the team members. In addition, coordination is required to sort out problems due to technical dependencies that exist when components of one part of the architecture requires services or data input from components of another part of the architecture. The dynamic allocation of the different tasks to people results in various socio-technical structure clashes (STSCs). These STSCs become more pronounced in an Agile Software Development environment and managerial intervention is constantly required to alleviate problems due to STSCs. In this paper we provide a method to detect these STSCs in a longitudinal fashion with the help of a tool that we are developing. We test this method in a case study of a software company and show how such structure clashes can be detected by analyzing the social network (along with the betweenness centrality index) in relation to the task dependencies due to the software architecture.