Modeling a Global Software Development Project as a Complex Socio-Technical System to Facilitate Risk Management and Improve the Project Structure
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Presentation at the 10th IEEE International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE 2015) Pre-proceedings available at:http://bit.ly/1MBpxWY Any global software development project needs to deal with distances – geographical, cultural, time zone, etc. – between the groups of developers engaged in the project. To successfully manage the risks caused by such distances, there is a need to explicate and present the distances in a form suitable for manual or semi-automatic analysis, the goal of which is to detect potential risks and find ways of mitigating them. The paper presents a technique of modeling a global software development project suitable for such analysis. The project is modeled as a complex socio-technical system that consists of functional components connected with each other through output-input relationships. The components do not coincide with the organizational units of the project and can be distributed through the geographical and organizational landscape of the project. The modeling technique helps to explicate and represent various kinds of distances between the functional components to determine which of them constitute risk factors. The technique was developed during two case studies, of which the second is used for presenting and demonstrating the new modeling technique in the paper.
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Modeling a Global Software Development Project as a Complex Socio-Technical System to Facilitate Risk Management and Improve the Project Structure
- 1. DSV SU Modeling a Global Software Development Project as a Complex Socio-Technical System to Facilitate Risk Management and Improve the Project Structure? 1 Ilia Bider, Henning Otto 10th IEEE International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE)
- 2. DSV SU The goal of our research project Propose a technique for modeling a distributed software development project as a system to be used for: • Identifying places in the project with a potential risk • Discussing and designing the ways of mitigating the risks
- 3. DSV SU Plan of presentation 1. Knowledge base 2. Combining components of knowledge based use in a new modeling technique 3
- 4. DSV SU Knowledge base used 1. Own experience from software development 2. Socio-technical systems theory 3. Functional decomposition of an organization (e.g. IDEF0) 4. Theory of distances (geographical, temporal, etc.) 5. Step-relationship modeling technique for business processes 6. Two case studies of GSD projects at a large ICT provider
- 5. DSV SU 1. Own experience: about me • For most of my life: Practitioner + Researcher in IT related fields • At the end settling down in academia to reflect on and pass to others my experience • Experienced in software development projects – Including requirements engineering, software development, introducing IT in organizations – big and small, non-agile and agile, successful and unsuccessful – In different capacities, such as a programmer, group leader, consultant, bug fixer, technical project manager 5
- 6. DSV SU 1. Own Experience: our team • Bogumila Rutkowska – a project manager from the ICT provider and her team • Thanos Karapantelakis – a researcher and PhD student from the ICT provider • Two MS students from SU (Department of Computer and Systems Sciences) – Henning Otto (project modeling) – Saga Willysson (model visualization) 6
- 7. DSV SU 2. Socio-technical systems Tasks TechnologyStructure People Social Technical Adopted from: R. P. Bostrom and J. S Heinen, "MIS problems and failures: A socio-technical perspective," MIS Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 17-32, 1977.
- 8. DSV SU 3. Functional decomposition IDEF0 – a most popular notation for functional decomposition Block diagrams – the simplest notation Connecting outputs to inputs: output/input relationships
- 9. DSV SU 3. Functional decomposition Software project
- 10. DSV SU 4. Distances 1. Geographical 2. Time zone (in addition to 1) 3. Organizational (independent from 1 & 2) 4. Professional (independent from 1, 2, 3) 5. Cultural (in addition to 1or/and 3 or and 4) Distances can exists between • The members of a team • The teams themselves (even when teams are homogenous) 10
- 11. DSV SU 5. Step-relationship modeling of business processes Goal with the step-relationship modeling technique: • Discover essential properties of a business process without going into too many details • Enough to derive requirements on capabilities of IT-tools that would provide satisfactory support for people engaged in the process 11
- 12. DSV SU 5. Step-relationship modeling Main notions of modeling technique: • Step (phase, work package) a unit of work; a model includes a small number of steps 5-10 • Relationships between the steps of different kinds, e.g. output/input, parallel execution, etc. Relationships can be presented • graphically; easy to understand • In the form of orthogonal matrixes; these could be manipulated formally 12
- 13. DSV SU 6. Two GSD projects at a large ICT provider Who has completed a transition from: • a traditional phase-based development approach with local software development teams To • working in an iterative manner using the Scrum project management methodology and employing geographically distributed teams 13
- 14. DSV SU 6. The second GSD project • Four different locations distributed across four countries (Three in Europe and one in Asia) • Different types of organizations involved (Main organization, subdivision and subcontractors) • Different types of professions involved (Management, technical design staff, test engineers) 14
- 15. DSV SU Plan of presentation 1. Knowledge base 2. Combining components of knowledge based use in a new modeling technique 15
- 16. DSV SU Software project – simplified model Starting with functional decomposition Is having output/input relationships enough? Only if the same team do the job in all components
- 17. DSV SU The work of feedback controller manned by humans Adding feedback connections
- 18. DSV SU Functional decomposition with feedback Is adding feedback enough?
- 19. DSV SU Risks in GSD projects 1. Absence or deficiency of feedback connections 2. Parallel dependencies between functional components 3. Heterogeneous teams 4. Distances between the teams
- 20. DSV SU Mitigating the risks 1. Through social structure, e.g. intersecting teams 2. Through technical infrastructure, e.g. systems/tools that support teams and communication between them 3. Through a combination of both Need to represent the risks and ways of mitigating them in the model
- 21. DSV SU Representing distances inside
- 22. DSV SU Composite view: teams intersection
- 23. DSV SU Composite view: example 2
- 24. DSV SU Parallel execution - graphical form
- 25. DSV SU Parallel execution – matrix form
- 26. DSV SU End of presentation Additional reading: 1. Proceedings of this conference 2. I. Bider, A. Karapantelakis, and N. Khadka, "Building a High-Level Process Model for Soliciting Requirements on Software Tools to Support Software Development: Experience Report," in Short Paper Proceedings of the 6th IFIP WG 8.1 Working Conference on the Practice of Enterprise Modeling (PoEM 2013). CEUR, Vol. 1023, Riga, Latvia, 2013, pp. 70- 82. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1023/paper7.pdf 3. I. Bider and E Perjons, "Design science in action: developing a modeling technique for eliciting requirements on business process management (BPM) tools," Software & Systems Modeling, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10270-014-0412-6, 2014. 26
- 27. DSV SU Q & A Thank you for your patience Questions and comments Please Contact: ilia@{dsv.su|ibissoft}.se 27