No abstract

A widely held understanding of coordination in software development is that it focuses on coordinating development activities to achieve a common goal. Our study, a case study in an international ICT company, suggests that in multi-site environment, it is not enough to coordinate development activities to achieve a common goal. Rather, more emphasis should be put on coordinating interdependencies between activities. Shifting the interest from activities (and subsystems) toward system-level dependencies requires software architects and developers to have a common understanding of the software architecture. Our findings reflect coordination challenges in multi-site environment with geographically dispersed teams. On the basis of the findings, we claim that architecture could be used to coordinate distributed development. However, this requires that the chief architect is capable of maintaining the integrity of the architecture and of communicating it. Furthermore, we list some requirements for a development methodology that uses architecture to support the coordination.

Existing CASE tools are often rigid and do not support the users' native methodologies. To alleviate this, more flexible and customisable tools called CASE shells are emerging. However, the customisation of those tools is still cumbersome and error-prone, and demands several configuration files that follow a rigid syntax of some metamodelling language(s). In order to make the eustomisation easier, we propose a graphical metamodelling editor, MetaEdit, with which the conceptual structures of the user methodology can be modelled easily using an easy-to-grasp graphical notation. With MetaEdit, methodology models can be ¢onsmacted with less effort and the configuration files for the CASE sheU can be created (semi)automatically. The tool is flexible i.e. its symbols and metamodel are user-definable. In consequence it can be used as a simple CASE shell. MetaEdit is based on the Object-Property-Role-Relationship (OPRR) data model. The paper presents the principles on which the editor is built, describes its operation, and discusses its relations to other research on metamodelling.

This chapter explores how two organizations have changed their software development practices by introducing Open Source technology. Our aim is to understand the institutional changes that are needed in and emerge from this process. This chapter develops a conceptualization building on the insights of entrepreneurial institutionalism, concentrating on the changing relationships of organizational groups in the areas of decision-making, rewarding and communication. We identify the links between the 1) emerging, yet embedded technology and 2) the underlying institutional decision-making, reward and communication structures. We move the Open Source 2.0 research agenda forward by concentrating empirical work on the nuances of institutional change that open source brings about in large hierarchical organisations. We will discuss the appropriateness of internal accounting organized according to the principle of an open market vs. a local library. We believe that both of these metaphors can support innovation, but different groups will find different approaches more appealing.