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

软件项目是由人类创建和维护的最复杂的系统之一。如今，一个大型软件项目通常包含数千个软件工件，以及数百万行源代码、文档、规范、构建脚本等。通常，许多个人，例如开发人员、测试人员、架构师和维护人员，都参与到开发和演进的过程中，并且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、现在或将来的项目目标。有两个因素导致了软件项目的复杂性，从而影响了项目的状态。首先，技术工件的集合（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，因此称为技术系统。其次，所涉及的协调需求和参与者的努力的总和增加了软件项目的复杂性，因此称为社会系统。除了技术和社会系统固有的复杂性之外，这两个系统相互作用（例如，开发人员编辑文件，文件由开发人员拥有），这种相互作用增加了整体的复杂性。“一致性”的首要目标是开发和评估作为软件项目分析和进化的一种新颖的、整体的方法的双系统视图。我们将系统地探索在软件项目的社会系统和技术系统之间产生的交互空间和模式，以及为开发人员和维护人员提供有用见解的可操作性。我们的关键假设是社会技术模式与期望的或不期望的项目状态有关，因此它们的识别可以指导项目分析、管理和进化。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（类型或程度），以及关于如何在大规模、分散和分布式的软件项目中引出和维持社会技术一致性的知识基础和定量的因果理论。除了基本的见解外，我们还将关注实际应用。我们的目标是通知和推动方法的开发，直接帮助个人开发人员和开发人员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.