Content and Temporal Analysis of Communications to Predict Task Cohesion in Software Development Global Teams

Abstract

numbered references.Messages were collected from three software development projects that involved students from two different countries. The similarities and quantities of these interactions were computed and analyzed at individual and group levels. Results of interaction-based metrics showed that the collaboration variables most related to Task Cohesion were Linguistic Style Matching and Information Exchange. The study also found that Information Exchange rate and Reply rate have a significant and positive correlation to Task Cohesion, a factor used to describe participants' engagement in the global software development process. All these results suggest that metrics based on rate can be very useful for predicting cohesion in virtual groups. Similarly, content features based on communication categories were used to improve the identification of Task Cohesion levels. Also, at a group-level, all models were found correlated to Task Cohesion, specifically, Similarity+Rate, which suggests that models that include social and work communication categories are also good predictors of team cohesiveness. Finally, temporal interaction similarity measures were calculated to assess their prediction capabilities in a global setting. Results showed a significant negative correlation between the Pacing Rate and Task Cohesion, which suggests that frequent communications increases the cohesion between team Last but not least, I want to thank my family for always encouraging me and believing in me. This dissertation is also a result of their unconditional love and support.iii Another important team process that is affected by conditions within a remote collaboration setting is group cohesion. Previous research has found that communication technology (such as chat and email) often delays the development of the group cohesion construct [38]. As a result, global teams tend to have much lower group cohesion levels than co-located groups. One of the reasons why it is important to examine group cohesion levels within global virtual teams is that research has shown that this construct seems to affect how a team deals with different obstacles during the development of a project. In addition, the relation between group cohesion and other constructs (e.g. trust) has been shown to have an indirect relationship to team performance [21]. Using the above studies as a starting point, we studied the integration of metrics based on interaction type and amount, content features and temporal data to predict group cohesiveness.Our investigation used data collected in a collaborative setting in which participants from different countries worked together to complete a software development project.This study focused on the following aspects of the construct: first, it compared previous collaboration measures that had been used to analyze computer-based communications and determined which of these measures were most effective for predicting Task Cohesion; second, we developed a measure based on content features and determined if it could be used to im...