Software engineering researchers have long argued that the architecture of a system plays a pivotal role in coordinating development work. Over 30 years ago, Melvin Conway proposed what has since become known as Conway's Law-that the structure of the system mirrors the structure of the organization that designed it. 1 This relation, Conway argued, is a necessary consequence of the communication needs of the people doing the work. David Parnas, in fact, defined a software module as "a responsibility assignment rather than a subprogram," 2 driving home the idea that modular design enables decisions about the internals of each module to be made independently. Of course, the computer that runs the software doesn't care. The point of structure is to support coordination of the development work. Architecture, however, addresses only one of the several dimensions on which we must coordinate development. To support efficient use of resources, projects require plans that specify when milestones must be completed and who will do the Architectures, Coordination, and Distance: Conway's Law and Beyond Geographically distributed development teams face ex traordinary communication and coordination problems. The authors' case study clearly demonstrates how common but unanticipated events can stretch project communication to the breaking point. Project schedules can fall apar t, par ticularly during integration. Modular design is necessary, but not sufficient to avoid this fate.

Abstract. The smart home offers a new opportunity to augment people's lives with ubiquitous computing technology that provides increased communications, awareness, and functionality. Recently, a number of trends have increased the likelihood that the aware home can soon become a reality. We examine a number of challenges from the technical, social, and pragmatic domains that we feel must be overcome before the vision of the smart home, posited by ubiquitous computing research, can become a reality. Our hope in raising these issues is to create a conversation among researchers in the varied disciplines that make up ubiquitous computing. In particular, we hope to raise awareness of the existing literature on the adoption, use, and history of domestic technologies, as well as the use of situated studies, and the benefits that these can bring to bear on the design and evaluation of technologies for the home

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Robots have entered our domestic lives, but yet, little is known about their impact on the home. This paper takes steps towards addressing this omission, by reporting results from an empirical study of iRobot's Roomba™, a vacuuming robot. Our findings suggest that, by developing intimacy to the robot, our participants were able to derive increased pleasure from cleaning, and expended effort to fit Roomba into their homes, and shared it with others. These findings lead us to propose four design implications that we argue could increase people's enthusiasm for smart home technologies.

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Collaborations over distance must contend with the loss of the rich, subtle interactions that co-located teams use to coordinate their work. Previous research has suggested that one consequence of this loss is that cross-site work will take longer than comparable single-site work. We use both survey data and data from the change management system to measure the extent of delay in a multi-site software development organization. We also measure site interdependence, differences in same-site and cross-site communication patterns, and analyze the relationship of these variables to delay. Our results show a significant relationship between delay in cross-site work and the degree to which remote colleagues are perceived to help out when workloads are heavy. This result is particularly troubling in light of the finding that workers generally believed they were as helpful to their remote colleagues as to their local colleagues. We discuss implications of our findings for collaboration technology for distributed organizations.

Abstract:Recently, households have begun to adopt networking technologies to interconnect devices within the home. Yet little is known about the consequences for households of setting up and living with these complex networks, nor the impact of such technologies on the routines of the home. In this paper, we report findings from an empirical study of households containing complex networks of computer and audio/visual technologies. Our study finds that home networks require significant household effort not just to coordinate their use, but also their set up and maintenance. We also show how the coordination around networking has to be worked into the routines of the home and the householders.