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

大规模、去中心化和分布式软件项目中社会技术一致性的基础和含义

• 批准号: 433609794
• 负责人: Professor Dr.-Ing. Sven Apel
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Lehrstuhl für Software Engineering
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 资助国家: 德国
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/433609794?language=en
• 关键词: Foundations; Implications; Socio; Technical; Congruence

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.

软件项目是人类创建和维护的最复杂的系统之一。当今的大型软件项目通常由数千个软件工件组成，其中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，都参与到开发和演变的过程中，他们通常分布在世界各地。一个关键的挑战是识别决定项目状态的因素，以及判断项目是否满足过去、现在或将来的项目目标。首先，技术工件的集合（例如，代码、模型、文档）及其相互依赖和相互作用是一个关键的复杂性因素，此后称为技术系统。第二，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，此后称为社会系统。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，文件归开发人员所有），这种交互增加了整体的复杂性。“Congruence”的首要目标是开发和评估两个系统的观点，作为一种新颖的、整体的软件项目分析和演化方法。我们将系统地探索软件项目的社会和技术系统之间的互动空间和模式，以及为开发人员和维护人员提供有用见解的操作化。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有关，因此，它们的识别可以指导项目分析，管理和演变。为此，我们的目标是开发一个系统的和一般的方法，如何衡量（的种类或程度）的社会技术一致性以及知识和定量的认识基础，因果理论如何引起和维护社会技术一致性在大规模的，分散的，分布式的软件项目。除了基本的见解，我们将保持实际应用的视线。我们的目标是告知和推动直接帮助个人开发人员和开发人员团队改进日常工作的方法的开发。