Management of Interdependencies in Collaborative Software Development

In this paper we report results of an informal field study of a software development team conducted during an eight week internship at the NASA/Ames Research Center. The team develops a suite of tools called MVP, and is composed of 31 co-located software engineers, who design, test, document, and maintain the different MVP tools. We describe the formal and informal approaches used by this group to manage the interdependencies that occur during the software development process. Formal approaches are legitimated by the organization, whereas informal approaches emerge due to the needs of the developers. We also describe how the software development tools used by this team support these approaches and explore where explicit support is needed. Finally, based on our findings, we discuss implications for software en-