Collaborative Research: SHF: Small: Distributed Fragmented Software Design Meetings

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While many software development teams were already operating in a distributed manner, COVID-19 has caused a seismic shift to remote work across the entire tech industry. This shift appears to be long-term: many organizations are planning or have already decided to make hybrid work or full work-from-home a permanent option. Design remains as important as ever in these settings. A common practice that has emerged is distributed fragmented software design meetings. These meetings, conducted on a regular schedule and online, bring together a core team to address day-to-day design issues. Unfortunately, the discontinuity and lack of proper tool support cause the meetings not to be as effective and efficient as they could and should be, with many varied issues arising that negatively affect the quality of the resulting software and the schedule by which it is being produced. By studying several teams engaged in distributed, fragmented softwaredesign meetings, this research project will document the issues encountered in distributed, fragmented software design meetings and the impact these issues have on the project. It will then design, implement,evaluate, and make available new tools and practices to overcome the issues. Finally, it will adapt the tools and lessons learned for use in the classroom, so students become better prepared for future careers in which they must engage in hybrid and remote software design.A guiding concept throughout the project will be important design bits (IDBs), short excerpts from past design meetings that capture information that may be relevant to future design meetings. IDBs will serve as the primary lens for analyzing the design meetings to be studied and as the organizing unit of support in the planned novel tools. Combining video analysis, interviews, surveys, tool design, and assessment, the research will uncover current practices, strengths, issues, and opportunities for improvement, as well as create tools that support distributed, fragmented software design meetings through lightweight capture and retrieval of IDBs. The insights learned will enable organizations large and small to evaluate their practices and implement improvements; the novel open-sourced tools will be adoptable by any software organization to support their distributed, fragmented software design meetings; and the classroom interventions will be integratable in typical software engineering capstone courses as taught in nearly any computing program.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.