| Board Meetings: The Impact of Scheduling Medium on Long Term Group Coordination in Software Development (2007) | |||||||||||||||||
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| Despite a wealth of electronic group tools for coordinating the software development process, instead we find many groups preferring to use apparently outmoded "material" tools in critical projects. The current ethnographic study investigates this paradox. We begin by building up a detailed picture of the overall software development process and identify critical general problems in achieving coordination. Coordination problems arise in software development from the complex dependencies that hold among the work of different individuals. We identify the critical role of the schedule as a coordination device, but find that its value can be undermined because the schedule is often neither accurate nor current. As a result, the schedule is not used as a resource for individual or group planning, and we identify the reasons why this occurs. We then compare coordination in two development groups, one using electronic and the other material scheduling tools. We found that the medium ... | |||||||||||||||||
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