Towards Multi-Class Socio-Technical Congruence: Assessing Coordination in Collaborative Software Development Settings

Effective coordination between contributors with different functional roles is fundamental for the success of collaboration-centric software development paradigms such as DevSecOps. However, quantitatively assessing coordination in such settings has received limited attention. We introduce multi-class socio-technical congruence ($MC\text{-}STC$), an extension of the widely studied socio-technical congruence ($STC$) framework to address this gap. Our metric enables the assessment of coordination in a setting where contributors with different functional roles or alignments collaborate. Using a large-scale exploratory case study, we evaluated $MC\text{-}STC$ for two classes (i.e., $2C\text{-}STC$). Specifically, we calculated $2C\text{-}STC$ for 100 systematically selected projects from the TravisTorrent dataset, considering developers (dev) and security-focused developers (sf-devs) as the two types of contributors with different functional alignments (i.e., two classes). We hypothesized that the dev and sf-dev interaction would have a quantifiable impact on the vulnerability score ($VS$) of each project. Our results show a moderate negative association between $2C\text{-}STC$ and $VS$, with the Spearman correlation reaching $-$0.427 ($p=0.00000624$), indicating that higher levels of coordination between dev and sf-dev led to projects with a lower incidence of high-severity vulnerabilities. In addition, $2C\text{-}STC$ shows a stronger negative relationship with $VS$ than $STC$, suggesting that it is the more sensitive indicator of this relationship. Therefore, the specific instantiation of our proposed metric, $2C\text{-}STC$, performs comparatively better than $STC$ for measuring cross-functional coordination in our selected projects. However, further research is needed to explore its broader applicability.