A framework for studying the coordination process in software engineering

Software engineering is based on many interdependent processes involving many interacting stakeholders with conflicting interests and points of view. The management of dependencies between stakeholders activities corresponds to the coordination process. This process plays a key role in software engineering notably because of the large use of networks, distributed computing and groupware technology. Nevertheless, coordination activities are neglected by well established methods and tools in software engineering, which stress in particular the technical aspects related to development and maintenance of software systems. In this paper, we propose a framework for studying the foundations and the basic activities of the coordination process. Since the coordination process consists in managing dependencies between software engineering activities, our framework has two major objectives. The first objective consists in identifying the different categories of stakeholders and characterizing their interactions and the dependencies between their activities resulting from these interactions. The second objective is the description of the appropriate coordination activities that can be used to manage these dependencies.