Modeling and Analyzing Information Flow in Development Teams as a Pipe System

Teamwork is essential for developing valuable software. Working in a team requires an appropriate information exchange among team members in order to avoid loss of information. In order to analyze and improve information flows, it is recommended to observe the information exchange in a team. We propose an approach for modeling the information flow of teams as a pipe system. Different pipe diameters represent the amount of information passing through the pipe. In order to show the applicability of our approach, we conducted a case study in a globally distributed software engineering company. The study consists of the elicitation of information flows inside the company and the automated analysis by our approach. We are able to visualize the information flows, find critical paths such as bottlenecks, and improve information flow structures. This enables project leaders to customize the communication structure to the needs of their team and to prevent loss of information.

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