Robert E. Kraut
Lynn A. Streeter
Abstract
Since its inception, the software industry has been in crisis. As Blazer noted 20 years ago, “[Software] is unreliable, delivered late, unresponsive to change, inefficient, and expensive … and has been for the past 20 years” [4]. In a survey of software contractors and government contract officers, over half of the respondents believed that calendar overruns, cost overruns, code that required in-house modifications before being usable, and code that was difficult to modify were common problems in the software projects they supervised [22]. Even today, problems with software systems are common and highly-publicized occurrences.
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Index Terms
- Coordination in software development
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Reviews
Richard A. Baker
Kraut and Streeter present an interesting study of the various methods of software project coordination. This study evaluates the effectiveness of these coordination techniques and compares their effectiveness with how frequently each is used. The study is based on interviews with the people involved in 65 software projects at a single company. The paper concludes that there is a strong correlation between interpersonal communication and project success. The paper presents interesting basic research on project coordination techniques and provides conclusions. However, Kraut and Streeter could have extended their conclusions far deeper into management techniques. For instance, their data show the importance of co-locating engineers and of encouraging informal discussions among project members. The data could be further analyzed to show the communications difficulties that arise with telecommuting, and their impact on project success. Another drawback of this paper is the study's restriction to data from a single company. Use of data from more than one corporate culture would better demonstrate that the conclusions drawn here apply to the industry as a whole. Overall, however, this paper is excellent reading for all project managers, because it provides both the data and the analysis to support the use of various coordination techniques.
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