Case Study: The Optimization of Information Flow & Organization in Software Development

Trial and error are inevitable in the process of software development; the redesign is wasteful when unfocused communication occurs within the development process. To speed up this development process, we optimized the information flow and redesigned the development organization into chunks. First, we investigated the information flow between tasks and coupled tasks into phases utilizing the Design Structure Matrix (DSM) so that the information exchange among chunks of tasks is as few as possible. In this way, the redundant iterations of tasks are eliminated. Meanwhile, we also grouped the engineers into groups according to the tasks, in this; we eliminated wasteful communications between the groups of engineers. We depict the social network defined by the information flow within the software development sector and compared the new arrangement to the old arrangement in a visible way. This new arrangement will facilitate the communications between engineers and speed up the process of software development.