Prof. Daniele Damian an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Victoria, Canada [1], visited IPD on 11th June and talked about her research. She presented with a brief overview of her research in collaborative software engineering at the SEGAL (Software Engineering Global interAction Laboratory) [2]. In more detail she described our recent projects and in particular I presented methodologies and empirical results from her field studies at large software organizations in which the investigated the communication and coordination in projects beyond the technical dependencies found in software code.

Most of existing knowledge we have about coordination in software projects is about developers managing their work as informed by dependencies in the code that they produce. However, software projects are driven by many other dependencies that are not of technical nature, and most often guided by the project requirements. This complex process involves parties other than developers, such as clients, analysts, designers and testers, and their effective coordination is crucial to project success. Our multi-method research approaches combine methods of network analysis, social network surveys, qualitative observations in software projects, data mining as well as automated classification of online communication in large software repositories. Our work reveals patterns of requirements-driven communication in globally distributed software teams, the role of brokers in project communication, as well as the application of automated support to identify problematic requirements from online project communication.