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Identification of coordination requirements: implications for the Design of collaboration and awareness tools

Published: 04 November 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Task dependencies drive the need to coordinate work activities. We describe a technique for using automatically generated archi-val data to compute coordination requirements, i.e., who must coordinate with whom to get the work done. Analysis of data from a large software development project revealed that coordina-tion requirements were highly volatile, and frequently extended beyond team boundaries. Congruence between coordination re-quirements and coordination activities shortened development time. Developers, particularly the most productive ones, changed their use of electronic communication media over time, achieving higher congruence. We discuss practical implications of our technique for the design of collaborative and awareness tools.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CSCW '06: Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work
November 2006
548 pages
ISBN:1595932496
DOI:10.1145/1180875
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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Published: 04 November 2006

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Author Tags

  1. collaboration tools
  2. coordination
  3. dynamic network analysis
  4. task awareness tools

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CSCW06: Computer Supported Cooperative Work
November 4 - 8, 2006
Alberta, Banff, Canada

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