Towards Multi-Class Socio-Technical Congruence: Assessing Coordination in Collaborative Software Development Settings

Abstract

Effective coordination between contributors with different functional roles is fundamental for the success of collaboration-centric software development paradigms such as DevSecOps. However, quantitatively assessing coordination in such settings has received limited attention. We introduce multi-class socio-technical congruence ((Formula presented.)), an extension of the widely studied socio-technical congruence ((Formula presented.)) framework to address this gap. Our metric enables the assessment of coordination in a setting where contributors with different functional roles or alignments collaborate. Using a large-scale exploratory case study, we evaluated (Formula presented.) for two classes (i.e., (Formula presented.)). Specifically, we calculated (Formula presented.) for 100 systematically selected projects from the TravisTorrent dataset, considering developers (dev) and security-focused developers (sf-devs) as the two types of contributors with different functional alignments (i.e., two classes). We hypothesized that the dev and sf-dev interaction would have a quantifiable impact on the vulnerability score ((Formula presented.)) of each project. Our results show a moderate negative association between (Formula presented.) and (Formula presented.), with the Spearman correlation reaching (Formula presented.) 0.427 ((Formula presented.)), indicating that higher levels of coordination between dev and sf-dev led to projects with a lower incidence of high-severity vulnerabilities. In addition, (Formula presented.) shows a stronger negative relationship with (Formula presented.) than (Formula presented.), suggesting that it is the more sensitive indicator of this relationship. Therefore, the specific instantiation of our proposed metric, (Formula presented.), performs comparatively better than (Formula presented.) for measuring cross-functional coordination in our selected projects. However, further research is needed to explore its broader applicability.