Effecting Change: Coordination in LargeScale Software Development

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Effecting Change Coordination in Large-Scale
Software Development

• IS342 Summer 08
• By
• Victor Chin
• Ken Hoang
• Kulman Kapoor

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Introduction

• Difficulty in coordinating work between
  development teams
• Increasing difficulty as teams become
  international
• Europe, India, China

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Coordination Study

• Development team at Microsoft
• 300 devs.
• Redmond, WA
• Boston, WA
• Hyderabad, India

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International Team Composition
Component 1
Component 2
Component 3
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Coordination Study

• Questionnaire to team members
• Helpful or unhelpful events relating to
• Communication
• Capacity
• Cooperation
• Distribution

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Communication
Distribution

• Meetings
• Awareness
• Communication modalities
• Frequency
• Quality

• Location
• Time Zone

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Capacity
Co-operation

• Amount of work
• Availability

• Dependency management
• Division of labor
• Willingness to help

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Treatments

• Location solutions
• Cut informal hallways meetings
• Send status updates electronically
• Challenge
• Cant monitor peoples decision that will affect
  other team members
• Summarize issues

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Treatments cont..

• Time zone solutions
• Eliminate distributed teams
• Buddy system
• Hold meeting early/late in night
• Challenge
• People are married with children
• Overseas hence schedule sync problem

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Treatments cont..

• Status solutions
• Frequent status meetings with dependencies
• Face to face, if possible
• Post status updates online
• Align team priorities
• Challenge
• Too many meetings prevents work
• Status updates are Ad-hoc , difficult to
  formalize

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Where are the REAL answers?

• No real solution
• Behavioral problem

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Possible Solutions

• Co-location
• Short term face to face collaboration (3-6
  months) on mission critical tasks
• Non distributed teams
• Use only local site team members
• QA