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Forecasting Communication Behavior in Student Software Projects

Published: 09 September 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Communication is an essential part of software product development. Therefore, communication is an inevitable means for information sharing. For example, ill-communicated requirements, guidelines or decisions complicate working in a team and may threaten project success. Hence, monitoring communication behavior can help fostering project success by preventing loss of information due to insufficient communication.
Knowledge about a team's communication behavior and information sharing enables the corresponding project leader to react. Forecasting communication behavior can indicate critical situations like too little communication, inappropriate media or wrong receivers at early project stages. A good forecast can identify if there is a need to change communication behavior.
In a study with 165 students in 34 teams participating in a software project, we collected data concerning the used communication channels and perceived intensity. We combine these two parameters for analyzing and forecasting communication behavior. Considering the displayed evolution of communication behavior within a team can indicate the necessity to intervene. For example, the project leader can establish one more meeting each week to support information exchange.
Our forecasting algorithm bases on k-nearest neighbor selection in order to identify comparable projects. We validate this approach using cross validation, which leads to an average accuracy of 90%. This level of accuracy may provide a reliable forecast and a good opportunity for early conflict identification.

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  • (2018)Helping Teams to Help Themselves: An Industrial Case Study on Interdependencies During SprintsHuman-Centered Software Engineering10.1007/978-3-030-05909-5_3(31-50)Online publication date: 3-Sep-2018
  • (2018)Software Professionals’ Attitudes Towards Video as a Medium in Requirements EngineeringProduct-Focused Software Process Improvement10.1007/978-3-030-03673-7_11(150-158)Online publication date: 3-Nov-2018
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cover image ACM Other conferences
PROMISE 2016: Proceedings of the The 12th International Conference on Predictive Models and Data Analytics in Software Engineering
September 2016
84 pages
ISBN:9781450347723
DOI:10.1145/2972958
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 09 September 2016

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Author Tags

  1. Data collection
  2. collaboration in teams
  3. communication
  4. forecasting
  5. software development
  6. student software projects

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  • Research
  • Refereed limited

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PROMISE 2016

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PROMISE 2016 Paper Acceptance Rate 10 of 23 submissions, 43%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 98 of 213 submissions, 46%

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View all
  • (2024)Paving the Way Towards an Effective Vision Video Usage: An Exploratory Study2024 IEEE 32nd International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)10.1109/RE59067.2024.00048(407-415)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2024
  • (2018)Helping Teams to Help Themselves: An Industrial Case Study on Interdependencies During SprintsHuman-Centered Software Engineering10.1007/978-3-030-05909-5_3(31-50)Online publication date: 3-Sep-2018
  • (2018)Software Professionals’ Attitudes Towards Video as a Medium in Requirements EngineeringProduct-Focused Software Process Improvement10.1007/978-3-030-03673-7_11(150-158)Online publication date: 3-Nov-2018
  • (2017)Team Meetings and Their Relevance for the Software Development Process Over Time2017 43rd Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA)10.1109/SEAA.2017.57(313-320)Online publication date: Aug-2017
  • (2016)Miscommunication in Software Projects: Early Recognition Through Tendency ForecastsProduct-Focused Software Process Improvement10.1007/978-3-319-49094-6_62(731-738)Online publication date: 6-Nov-2016

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