Exploring Interrelationships among Project Entities to Support Coordination in Distributed Teams

This paper is geared to start a discussion about what data to preserve and analyze to facilitate collaborative production tasks. We do so by representing interrelationships among different project entities as networks and combining these networks using the concept of Meta Matrix – a methodology for combining individual networks to create derived networks to investigate. For illustration, we present how socio-technical dependencies, task dependencies, and knowledge networks can be constructed using the Meta Matrix. We conclude by showing how we used validated the feasibility of Meta Matrix by presenting Tesseract, a socio-technical browser that models a subset of individual and derived networks for a software project. It specifically, captures relations between developers, artifacts, and issues/bugs which is then displayed via a set of four juxtaposed, cross-linked displays. This effort is partially funded by the National Science Foundation under grant number IIS-0534775, IIS0329090, and the Software Industry Center and its sponsors, particularly the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Effort also supported by a 2007 Jazz Faculty Grant. The views and conclusions are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions of any sponsoring organizations/agencies.