The Role of Informal Communication in Building Shared Understanding of Non-Functional Requirements in Remote Continuous Software Engineering

Study Information

We conducted an ethnography-informed case study of a remote software organization that adopts CSE practices to explore how the organization builds a shared understanding of NFRs. Our study uses semi-structured interviews with a period of observations to answer the following research questions:

How does a remote software organization that adopts CSE practices reach a shared understanding of NFRs?

What are the limitations to the shared understanding of NFRs in a remote software organization that adopts CSE practices?

What organizational practices for remote collaboration supported a shared understanding of NFRs?

In our study, we refer to our partner organization as Alpha. We used ethnography-informed methods to study Alpha's practices and processes and how they approach a shared understanding of NFRs in their product development. 

Data Analysis

We performed a qualitative study through semi-structured interviews and observations. We use the open, axial and selective coding approach from grounded theory [1] to create our codebook, which informed the results and discussion of our study. Two independent coders held agreement sessions to discuss the codes, consolidate the codes and calculate the inter-rater reliability using the Cohen Kappa's coefficient for measuring observer agreement for categorical data [2]. 

Artifact Descriptions

Our replication package contains three artifacts:

1. Codebook.csv: The codebook contains rows for the list of codes used, including the code name and the description of the codes. The codes are the final set of themes derived during the thematic analysis of the interview responses. For example, 'Gaps in communication' means when interview participants describe miscommunications due to team members making assumptions about a project/process or having unclear expectations for a project.

2. kappa-scores.csv: This contains the associated kappa values for each round of inter-rater agreement sessions. For each agreement session, the Cohen Kappa's coefficient was calculated from the number of agreements and disagreements of codes within one or two interview transcripts. The Kappa values represent the level of agreement ranging from 0 to 1, where > 0.6 represents substantial agreement. 

3. Interview-questions.csv: This contains the interview questions used in the semi-structured interviews. Some of the interview questions varied depending on the interviewee’s role, experience and the flow of the interviews.

Usefulness

We recognize that the value and usefulness of our replication package are yet-to-be-determined.  In the interest of transparency of open science, we published our artifacts. We hope that these artifacts are useful to either replicate our findings or to further analyze them to produce other enlightening results.

References

1. Rashina Hoda, James Noble, and Stuart Marshall. "Grounded theory for geeks". In: Proceedings of the 18th conference on pattern languages of programs. 2011, pp. 1–17.

2. J Richard Landis and Gary G Koch. "The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data". In: biometrics (1977), pp. 159–174.