Measuring social networks when forming information system project teams
Abstract Despite the advances in the project management field, little is known about how creating performing software teams in a systematical and repeatable way. The technical dimension is not enough to achieve this. Software development is a complex collaborative process where people and interpersonal relationships – i.e., how people interact, behave and organize – significantly influence the project success. In this paper, we define a framework to assign people to projects from this socio-technical perspective. Social networks characterizing the interplay between teammates are built and analyzed to predict productive collaborations and identify adequate team-members depending on the organization needs and the kind of project. A noteworthy novelty of these social networks is that they estimate compatibility between coworkers according to previous collaborations, but also according to individuals’ social skills. This allows analyzing the compatibility among people who have not worked together before. We present results of using the proposed framework in a multinational corporation during a more-than-two-year period. Our in-company experiments emphasize that we can significantly improve the expected outcomes characterizing and measuring the social interaction among coworkers. Social aspects discussed may be highly relevant in the context of distributed software engineering, since it implies new challenges in the interplay among coworkers.