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Coordination Technologies

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Abstract

Coordination technologies improve the ability of individuals and groups to coordinate their efforts in the context of the broader, overall goal of completing one or more software development projects. Different coordination technologies have emerged over time with the objective of reducing both the number of occurrences of coordination problems as well as the impact of any occurrences that remain. This chapter introduces the Coordination Pyramid, a framework that provides an overarching perspective on the state of the art in coordination technology. The Coordination Pyramid explicitly recognizes several paradigm shifts that have taken place to date, as prompted by technological advancements and changes in organizational and product structure. These paradigm shifts have strongly driven the development of new generations of coordination technology, each enabling new forms of coordination practices to emerge and bringing with it increasingly effective tools through which developers coordinate their day-to-day activities.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank André van der Hoek and David Redmiles who had contributed to a previous version of the classification framework. A special thank you to Souti Chattopadhyay and Caius Brindescu for their help in reviewing and providing feedback on this chapter.

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  1. Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA

    Anita Sarma

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  1. College of Informatics, Korea University, Seoul, Korea (Republic of)

    Sungdeok Cha

  2. University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

    Richard N. Taylor

  3. Professor Emeritus, POSTECH, Pohang, Korea (Republic of)

    Kyochul Kang

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Sarma, A. (2019). Coordination Technologies. In: Cha, S., Taylor, R., Kang, K. (eds) Handbook of Software Engineering. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00262-6_10

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