Organizational congestion in large-scale software development

Abstract

Many software projects seek to shorten the development interval-the time from project inception to final release. To do this effectively, we must understand the mechanisms which increase these intervals, especially in large-scale software production. A significant portion of an individual feature interval seems to consist of the time lost while developers wait for meetings. We have created a simple model which relates the average waiting time to the number of meetings in developers' calendars. Generalizing from this model, we propose a change in the software inspection process. We hope this proposal will lead to further experiments. We present the motivations for our investigation, provide background information relevant to the general goals of our work, and briefly discuss related work. We then describe our model and the results of simulation runs. This is followed by a discussion of the implications with respect to large-scale software development. Finally, we offer our conclusions and suggest some solutions which we believe merit investigation.<>