Understanding the variation of software development tasks: A qualitative study

In order to reduce cost, get to market faster and utilize global talents, large companies often organize their software development globally (distributed over Internet), a paradigm advocated by Internetware. Considering the complexity of distributed software development, it is important to understand the variation of various tasks, so the projects could work more efficiently on plan formulation, personnel organization, or task allocation. The main goal of this paper is to understand the variations of software development tasks. We conduct an interview with 47 interviewees and a survey with 148 people from 15 projects with different size and domain.Through the analysis of interviews and surveys, we find that a software task could be characterized through three aspects: value, difficulty and centrality. Among them, task value is influenced by the role of stakeholders and project context, and is related to the task difficulty and task centrality. Task difficulty is reflected by technology, domain difference, working relationships, customer related issues, and it is also related to the developers' personalities. Task centrality can be described by customer impact, system-wide impact, team impact and future impact. We believe our results can help project managers to optimize task allocation, or adjust project plan, and thus achieve efficient development.