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Research aimed at understanding and addressing coordination breakdowns experienced in global software development (GSD) projects at Lucent Technologies took a path from open-ended qualitative exploratory studies to quantitative studies with a tight focus on a key problem – delay – and its causes. Rather than being directly associated with delay, multi-site work items involved more people than comparable same-site work items, and the number of people was a powerful predictor of delay. To counteract this, we developed and deployed tools and practices to support more effective communication and expertise location. After conducting two case studies of open source development, an extreme form of GSD, we realized that many tools and practices could be effective for multi-site work, but none seemed to work under all conditions. To achieve deeper insight, we developed and tested our Socio-Technical Theory of Coordination (STTC) in which the dependencies among engineering decisions are seen as defining a constraint satisfaction problem that the organization can solve in a variety of ways. I conclude by explaining how we applied these ideas to transparent development environments, then sketch important open research questions. 

Product architecture structures the coordination problem that the development organization must solve. The modularity strategy establishes design rules that fix module functionality and interfaces, and assigns development work for each module to a single team. The modules present relatively independent coordination problems that teams attempt to solve with all the traditional coordination mechanisms available to them. The applicability and effectiveness of this strategy is limited with increasing technical and organizational volatility. In the absence of theory explaining why and when modularity works, the technique is brittle, with very little firm basis for adjustment or for complementing it with other strategies. I present a theory of coordination, based on decision networks, that generalizes the modularity strategy. I review evidence testing several hypotheses derived from the theory, and explore how this theoretical view can drive coordination research and provide a theoretical basis for practical techniques to assist architects, developers, and managers.