A Distributed Cognition Account of Mature XP Teams

Distributed cognition is a framework for analysing collaborative work. It focuses on interactions between people, between people and their environment and between people and artefacts that are created and manipulated in the course of doing work, and it emphasises information flow and information transformation. Analyses conducted using the distributed cognition framework highlight breakdowns and potential problem areas in the collaborative work being studied; distributed cognition has been used to study a wide variety of collaborative work situations. XP teams are highly collaborative, relying heavily on interactions between team members and their environment. In this paper we present accounts of four mature XP teams based on the distributed cognition framework.

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