COMMUNICATION AND ORGANIZATION - AN EMPIRICAL-STUDY OF DISCUSSION IN INSPECTION MEETINGS

This paper describes an empirical study that addresses the issue of co mmunication among members of a software development organization. In p articular, data was collected concerning code inspections in one softw are development project. The question of interest is whether or not or ganizational structure (the network of relationships between developer s) has an effect on the amount of effort expended on communication bet ween developers. The independent variables in this study are various a ttributes of the organizational structure in which the inspection part icipants work. The dependent variables are measures of the communicati on effort expended in various parts of the code inspection process, fo cusing on the inspection meeting. Both quantitative and qualitative me thods were used, including participant observation, structured intervi ews, generation of hypotheses from field notes, statistical tests of r elationships, and interpretation of results with qualitative anecdotes . The study results show that past and present working relationships b etween inspection participants affect the amount of meeting time spent in different types of discussion, thus affecting the overall inspecti on meeting length. Reporting relationships and physical proximity also have an effect. The contribution of the study is a set of well-suppor ted hypotheses for further investigation.