L18: Collaboration, Managing People

Question 1

What is collaborative SWE?

Answer 1

• Any system developed by more than 1 person is collaborative
• Collaboration could be based on any artefact or process
• Requires a shared understanding of the system and communication mechanisms

Question 2

What are some challenges of collaborative development?

Answer 2

• Forming teams
• Distance: space, time, language, culture
• Sharing knowledge
• Coordinating activities and managing dependencies

Question 3

What is distributed collaboration?

Answer 3

Projects that are globally distributed. They can leverage location-specific expertise, exploit specific labour markets and possibly reduce costs.

However, there can be obstacles in relocation, time, culture differences.

Question 4

What are some tools for collaboration?

Answer 4

• Version control systems (Git)
• Trackers (keep track of issues, risks)
• Build tools
• Communication tools (synchronous and asynchronous) (Discord, slack, teams)

Question 5

What are some factors in people management?

Answer 5

Consistency
- Team members should all be treated in a comparable way without favourites or discrimination

Respect
- Different team members have different skills and these differences should be
respected

Inclusion
- Involve all team members and make sure that people’s views are considered

Honesty
- You should always be honest about what is going well and what is going badly in a project

Question 6

What are some personality types in a team?

Answer 6

Task-oriented
- The motivation for doing the work is the work itself

Self-oriented
- Motivated by personal success and recognition
- The work is a means to an end which is the achievement of individual goals - e.g. wealth, career progression

Interaction-oriented
- The principal motivation is the presence and actions of co-workers

Question 7

What is the importance of teamwork?

Answer 7

Most software engineering is a group activity

• The development schedule for most non-trivial software projects is such that they cannot be completed by one person working alone
• A good group is cohesive and has a team spirit
• Members are motivated by the success of the group as well as by their own personal goals
• Group interaction is a key determinant of group performance

Question 8

What is a cohesive group and what are its advantages?

Answer 8

In a cohesive group, members consider the group to be more important than any individual in it.

Advantages:
- Group quality standards can be developed by members
- Team members learn from and support each other
- Knowledge is shared
- Refactoring and continual improvement through collective work is encouraged

Question 9

How can we increase the effectiveness of a team?

Answer 9

People in the group
- You need a mix of people in a project group
- Software development involves diverse activities such as negotiating with clients, programming, testing and documentation

Group organisation
- A group should be organised so that individuals can contribute to the best
of their abilities and tasks can be completed as expected

Technical and managerial communications
- Good communications between group members, and between the software engineering team and other project stakeholders, is essential

Question 10

How should a group be composed?

Answer 10

• Group composed of members who share the same motivation can be problematic
• An effective group has a balance of all types
• Flexibility in group composition can be limited, managers must do the best they can with available people

Question 11

How should a group be organised?

Answer 11

• Small software engineering groups are usually organised informally without a rigid structure
• For large projects, there may be a hierarchical structure where different groups are responsible for different sub-projects
• Agile development is always based around an informal group on the principle that formal structure inhibits information exchange

Question 12

How should groups communicate?

Answer 12

• Information must be exchanged on the status of work, design decisions and changes to previous decisions
• Good communications also strengthens group cohesion as it promotes understanding

Question 13

What are some factors affecting group communication?

Answer 13

Group size
- The larger the group, the harder it is for people to communicate with other group members

Group structure
- Communication is better in informally structured groups than in hierarchically
structured groups

Group composition
- Communication is better when there are different personality types in a group and when groups are mixed in terms of gender, etc.

Physical work environment
- Good workplace organisation can help encourage communications