The study of socio-technical coordination using a socio-technical congruence model
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Coordination in software development, especially in global software development, is important because a team cannot perform well unless its team members communicate and maintain awareness of each other's activities. In order to improve socio-technical coordination, which is coordination among team members who work on interdependent technical entities, it must be conceptualized and measured. One measurement of coordination is socio-technical congruence, which calculates the alignment between technical relationships and social relationships. The problem is that there are a large number of social and technical factors to consider when using socio-technical congruence to study coordination. Current limitations with socio-technical congruence include the inability to represent the size of gaps in coordination between people, the sparse understanding of the role of awareness in conjunction with other coordination mechanisms, and the lack of a technique with which to model people who are involved in certain communication patterns , but not assigned to technical tasks. To address these limitations, this dissertation describes a socio-technical congruence model to study socio-technical coordination. The model focuses on refining conceptualizations of technical and social relationships between people, on describing an improved gap technique for calculating socio-technical alignment, and on providing guidelines on how to study coordination in teams using the socio-technical congruence model. I first develop the model theoretically from related work. I then conduct two empirical investigations to address limitations of the model. The first study examines awareness, using observational studies, in a small global team. The second study examines important communicators and people who emerge in coordination despite having no technical relationships by examining email archives from the same team. I conduct a third empirical investigation of a large global team to apply the model to study the relationship between socio-technical congruence and team performance with the project's repository. Finally, I revisit the model and improve it based on the empirical findings. The model refines conceptualizations of relationships, classifies emergent people who are suddenly involved with a task or a team during the project, and represents multi-variable relationships. It includes a template and an accompanying process for applying socio-technical congruence to study socio-technical coordination. This model enables researchers to study socio-technical coordination and analyze its effect on software engineering outcomes such as performance and quality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".