An Architecture-Centric Approach to Coordination

Empirical studies show that mismatches between design and organizational structures may cause expensive inter-team communication costs. However, prevailing design models and metrics are not designed for identifying independent, globally distributable task assignments, and do not account for organizational structure. Our research objectives are to develop design-centric theories, models, and measures to: (1) minimize the communication needs among developers, and (2) to accurately predict communication needs for performing maintenance tasks. To reach these objectives, we propose to develop design-centric theories and models to identify independent tasks from a design, and to predict coordination requirements from historical change-coupling.