A critical factor in work group coordination, communication has been studied extensively. Yet, we are missing objective evidence of the relationship between successful coordination outcome and communication structures. Using data from IBM's Jazz TM project, we study communication structures of development teams with high coordination needs. We conceptualize coordination outcome by the result of their code integration build processes (successful or failed) and study team communication structures with social network measures.Our results indicate that developer communication plays an important role in the quality of software integrations. Although we found that no individual measure could indicate whether a build will fail or succeed, we leveraged the combination of communication structure measures into a predictive model that indicates whether an integration will fail. When used for five project teams, our predictive model yielded recall values between 55% and 75%, and precision values between 50% to 76%.

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Creativity is an important topic in design research. Attempts have been made to develop methods and tools that can help designers become more creative. Yet how and why creativity occurs is still unknown to researchers. In this paper, we propose a theoretical model for creative design. This theoretical model builds on two postulates: 1) design reasoning follows a nonlinear dynamics, which may become chaotic; and 2) there is an inverse U shaped relationship between designer's mental stress and design creativity. In the first postulate, the nonlinear dynamics assumes the form of design governing equation and can be solved by Environment Based Design (EBD). The first postulate implies that design reasoning is sensitive to initial conditions, which are defined by the combination of design problem, design solutions, design knowledge, and other design related information. Since the major components in initial conditions may evolve simultaneously and are subject to continuous change during the design process, the design process is highly unpredictable. Some of the unpredictable solutions, which could be of high quality and useful, can be deemed creative. From this first postulate, three paths to creative design are derived, which specify how the initial conditions can be changed. The second postulate states that design creativity occurs when a designer is under a medium mental stress. Mental stresses are positively related to the workload associated with a design problem and negatively related to the designer's mental capacity. The workload is related to the complexity of the design problem and the amount of work in the design process whereas the mental capacity is related to the knowledge and skills required by the design process and to the designer's affect when dealing with the stresses arising from uncertainties and unpredictability of the design dynamics. To show how this theoretical model can be used to study design phenomena, an interpretation of the roles of sketching in design is presented.

Nowadays, distributed development is common in software development. Besides many advantages, research in the last decade has consistently found that distribution has a negative impact on collaboration in general, and communication and task completion time in particular. Adapted processes, practices and tools are demanded to overcome these challenges.We report on an empirical study of communication structures and delay, as well as task completion times in IBM's TM distributed development project Jazz TM . The Jazz project explicitly focuses on distributed collaboration and has adapted processes and tools to overcome known challenges. We explored the effect of distance on communication and task completion time and use social network analysis to obtain insights about the collaboration in the Jazz project. We discuss our findings in the light of existing literature on distributed collaboration and delays.