The official notifications for the International Conference on Software Engineering (2013) have been sent out. ICSE is an archival conference that is one of the top conferences in the field. This year, there was an 18.5% acceptance rate.

The paper is about how the presence of domain knowledge among team members affects how people coordinate in a software team. In addition, many of these teams have other hierarchical structures in place and recommend that certain people limit communications with others to follow team boundaries. We investigated two projects in a large global software organization and contrasted how they structured their teams and thus the resulting communication patterns. Some of the techniques they used to “spread” domain knowledge in the team were by incorporating new hires into the project, rotating roles, and making knowledgeable team members easily reachable.

I’ll give a detailed account of the paper when we get in our camera-ready version (which isn’t due until March)!

D. Damian, R. Helms, I. Kwan, S. Marczak, B. Koelewijn. The Role of Domain Knowledge and Hierarchical Control Structures in Socio-Technical Coordination, to appear in IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), San Francisco, USA, 2013.