Evaluating MIDST, A System to Support Stigmergic Team Coordination

Abstract

Data science teams working on a shared analysis face coordination problems such as dividing up the work to be done, monitoring performance and integrating the pieces. Research on distributed software development teams has raised the potential of stigmergic coordination, that is, coordination through a shared work product in place of explicit communication. The MIDST system was developed to support stigmergic coordination by making individual contributions to a shared work product visible, legible and combinable. In this paper, we present initial studies of a total of 40 student teams (24 using MIDST) that shows that teams that used MIDST did experience the intended system affordances to support their work, did seem to coordinate at least in part stigmergically and performed better on an assigned project.

Current approaches for executing big data science projects—a systematic literature review

“…Five papers explored how different tools, both custom and commercial, could be used to support various aspects of the execution of the data science projects. The tools explored focused on communication and collaboration ( Marin, 2019 ; Wang et al, 2019 ), Continuous Integration/Continuous Development ( Chen et al, 2020 ), the maintainability of a data science project ( Saltz et al, 2020 ) and a tool to improve the coordination of the data science team ( Crowston et al, 2021 ).…”