A Fine-grain Measure of Coordination: Implications for the Design of Collaboration and Awareness Tools

In this paper, we develop a technique to measure how congruent the actual organizational communication channels are relative to the coordination requirement imposed by the dependencies among tasks. We examine the role of congruence in the context of a closed source project of a large distributed system. Our results show that congruence helped reduce resolution time of software modification requests. We also explore the evolution of congruence across several releases of the product. As task dependencies changed over time, we found that developers, in particular the most productive ones, change their patterns of usage of communication technologies such as Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and task-tracking systems. Finally, we discuss the practical implications of our technique for the design of collaborative and awareness tools.