1An Analysis of Congruence Gaps and Their Effect on Distributed Software Development

Software projects are frequently distributed across multiple sites. While this practice takes advantage of local expertise and differential cost structures, there is a hidden coordination cost. Modularity and even agile methods have had mixed success in addressing distributed development. Recent studies on congruence provide a new way to understand coordination on software projects. We used a variation of congruence that focuses on gaps in communication to examine coordination in distributed development teams. Using archival data from a distributed software project we found that an increase in the number of gaps was associated with an increase in code changes. We also found that distributed pairs of developers had more gaps than collocated pairs. However, brokers, who communicated with people across multiple sites, had significantly fewer gaps than other developers. We discuss the implications of these findings in terms of opportunities to close gaps.