Publication Type

Book Chapter

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

3-2021

Abstract

DeMarco and Lister begin their classic Peopleware with an air of ominous inevitability “somewhere today, a project is failing” (DeMarco and Lister, 2013). They are talking about software projects, and as the book so brilliantly establishes, software is peopleware. A failed project is the dreaded culmination of all the perceptible and imperceptible risks that are associated with the project. For software projects, a large majority of such risks originate in the interactions of people who are involved in the project. People who build the software are the most valued and the most vulnerable asset of any software project, something that has been recognized ever since software became a large scale industrial enterprise (Brooks, 1995; Weinberg, 2011; Meyer, 2019). However, over past decade and half, global teams have become the primary vehicle for large scale software development. This has elevated the importance of developer interaction in the understanding and mitigation of software development risks. In this chapter, we present a perspective of developer interaction using the lens of motifs. Through a case study using development data from a large real-word system involving 2000+ individuals and 150000+ units of work, we demonstrate how a motif based view can endow a deeper sense of two of the critical drivers of software development risk – workload and task completion time.

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

Project Risk Management: Managing Software Development Risk

Volume

II

Editor

Kurt J. Engemann and Rory V. O'Connor

First Page

137

Last Page

160

ISBN

9783110648232

Publisher

De Gruyter Oldenbourg

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