Investigating Collaboration Driven by Requirements in Cross-Functional Software Teams

Achieving effective collaboration is an ongoing challenge in software development, and requirements engineering inherits this challenge. By taking a requirements perspective on collaboration we can better understand how cross-functional teams coordinate work throughout the project life-cycle. In this paper we report on a case study of a global IT company that investigated requirements-driven collaboration in a cross-functional team. We studied collaboration by examining the congruence between the technical dimension of work and social relationships team members establish. We calculated the mismatch between the social and technical dimensions. Based on the results, we critically analyzed the applicability of congruence to the study of cross-functional software teams as well as the limitations of current socio-technical congruence measures, which have been applied to only study developer teams. Based on this work, methods to investigate congruence between the social and technical dimensions of work have to be extended to incorporate information about pre-defined structures in the organization.