Design Structure Matrix

Trial and error are inevitable in the process of software development; unfocused communication wastes valuable resources during redesign. To speed up this development process, an optimization of the information flow and a redesign of the development organization were initiated, specifically by creating “chunks” or groupings of tasks and people. First, we investigated the information flow between tasks and utilized the Design Structure Matrix (DSM) to couple tasks into phases, thereby reducing information exchange among chunks of tasks and eliminating the redundant iterations of tasks. Meanwhile, we also grouped the engineers into groups in order to eliminate wasteful communications between the groups of engineers. We depicted 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.