Foundations and Implications of Socio-Technical Congruence in Large-Scale, Decentralized, and Distributed Software Projects

软件项目是人类创建和维护的最复杂的系统之一。如今的大型软件项目通常由数千个软件构件组成，这些构件包含数百万行源代码、文档、规范、构建脚本等。通常，许多人，如开发人员、测试人员、架构师和维护人员，都参与了开发和演变的过程，这些过程通常分布在世界各地。一个关键的挑战是确定确定项目状态的因素，以及判断项目是否满足过去、现在或未来的项目目标的因素。这两个因素导致软件项目的复杂性，从而影响项目的状态。首先，一组技术构件(例如，代码、模型、文档)及其相互依赖和交互是一个关键的复杂性因素，以下称为技术系统。其次，所涉及的主角的协调需求和努力的总和导致了软件项目的复杂性，以下称为社会系统。除了技术和社会系统的固有复杂性外，这两个系统还相互作用(例如，开发人员编辑文件和文件由开发人员拥有)，这种相互作用导致了总体复杂性。我们将系统地探索软件项目的社会系统和技术系统之间产生的交互的空间和模式，以及它们的可操作性，这将为开发人员和维护人员带来有用的见解。我们的关键假设是，社会技术模式与期望或不期望的项目状态相关，因此它们的识别可以指导项目分析、管理和发展。为此，我们的目标是开发一种系统和通用的方法来衡量社会技术一致性(种类或程度)，以及关于如何在大规模的、分散的和分布式的软件项目中引发和维护社会技术一致性的知识和量化的因果理论的认识论基础。除了基本的见解外，我们还将密切关注实际应用。我们的目标是提供信息并推动方法的开发，以直接帮助个人开发人员和开发团队改进他们的日常工作。

Software projects are among the most complex systems created and maintained by humans. A large-scale software project today comprises often thousands of software artifacts with millions of lines of source code, documentation, specification, build scripts, and so on. Typically, many individuals, such as developers, testers, architects, and maintainers, are involved in the process of development and evolution, often spread all over the world. A key challenge is to identify factors for determining the state of a project and for judging whether the project meets the project goals in the past, at present, or in the future.Two factors contribute to the complexity of a software project and thus influence the project's state. First, the set of technical artifacts (e.g., code, models, documentation) and their mutual dependencies and interactions are a key complexity factor, henceforth called the technical system. Second, the sum of coordination requirements and efforts of the protagonists involved contribute to the complexity of a software project, henceforth called the social system. Beside the inherent complexities of the technical and the social system, the two systems interact (e.g., developers edit files and files are owned by developers), and this interaction contributes to the overall complexity.The overarching goal of "Congruence" is to develop and evaluate the two-systems view as a novel, holistic approach of software-project analysis and evolution. We will systematically explore the space and patterns of interactions that arise between the social and the technical system of a software project and operationalizations thereof that give rise to useful insights for developers and maintainers. Our key hypothesis is that socio-technical patterns are related to desired or undesired project states, and their identification can therefore guide project analysis, management, and evolution. To this end, we aim at developing a systematic and general methodology of how to measure (the kind or degree of) socio-technical congruence as well as an epistemic base of knowledge and quantitative, causal theory on how to elicit and maintain socio-technical congruence in large-scale, decentralized, and distributed software projects. Beside fundamental insights, we will keep the practical application in sight. We aim at informing and driving the development of methods that directly help individual developers and teams of developers to improve their everyday work.