Socio-Technical Congruence (STC 2008) Organizers Marcelo Cataldo Research and Technology Center Bosch Corporate Research Pittsburgh, PA 15212, USA marcelo.cataldo@us.bosch.com Daniela Damian Department of Computer Science University of Victoria Victoria, BC, Canada danielad@cs.uvic.ca Premkumar Devanbu Department of Computer Science, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA ptdevanbu@ucdavis.edu Steve Easterbrook Department of Computer Science University of Toronto Toronto, Canada, M5S 2E4 sme@cs.toronto.edu James Herbsleb School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 jdh@cs.cmu.edu Audris Mockus Avaya Labs Research Basking Ridge, NJ 07920 audris@avaya.com Categories and Subject Descriptors D.2.0 Software Engineering, General. H.0 Information Systems, General General Terms Management, Design. 1. Workshop Theme The need for coordination among developers, teams, and organizations is one of the fundamental problems of real- world software engineering projects. Technical decisions about the structure of software serve to shape the extent and content of the required coordination, while team structure, social networks, work history, geographic location, and other organizational factors determine coordination capabilities. Understanding how to ensure that the coordination capabilities among developers are sufficient to perform the coordination required of them is an increasingly pressing research question that will require progress in many related research areas. See, e.g., [2-5]. The need for conformance between organizational characteristics and software design has long been recognized. As Conway famously claimed four decades ago, “any organization that designs a system will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure” [1]. Modular product structure [6] has long remained the primary tactic for managing technical dependencies in software. Today, project coordination is increasingly difficult because of factors such as global distribution of projects, and increasing scale. We need new and more effective approaches to technical coordination. One of the most promising is socio-technical congruence. The intensity of coordination required among teams varies substantially, driven not only by the degree of module coupling, but also by factors such as architectural change and nonfunctional requirements. On the other hand, geographic distribution, domain expertise, cultural and language barriers, and many other factors impact teams’ ability to coordinate their technical decisions. Congruence is achieved when coordination capabilities match or exceed coordination required. The STC workshop shared approaches and results, fostering a research community spanning diverse areas from software architecture to organizational behavior. An interdisciplinary approach is required in order to develop and validate theories that explain the complex and dynamic interactions between organizations and software. Topics covered in the workshop include • Measuring socio-technical congruence in software projects • Architectural and organizational tactics for achieving better congruence • Models and techniques for reasoning about tradeoffs between congruence and desirable technical characteristics • Methods for mining congruence data from software repositories • Impact of development practices on congruence • Factors influencing congruence in a variety of organizational forms, such as open source, outsourcing, global distribution • Variation in the type and nature of coordination required when developing in different architectural styles • Application of social network analysis in studying congruence • Analysis techniques for identifying important patterns of technical dependency requiring coordination Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). ICSE’08, May 10–18, 2008, Leipzig, Germany. ACM 978-1-60558-079-1/08/05. 1027