A Preliminary Study of Transactive Memory System and Shared Temporal Cognition in the Collaborative Software Process Tailoring

Software project teams often need to customize standard software processes to fit projects’ particularities. This process customization is called software process tailoring (SPT). SPT is a critical issue in contemporary software development such as agile; its importance is widely recognized in both practice and the academia, yet most of existing SPT literature focus on technical aspect at developing better tailoring guidelines and approaches. However, from the human and managerial perspective, SPT is a collaborative yet highly conflicting process involving task and temporal conflicts, and how teams’ operational mechanisms, under these situations, can increase SPT performance remain unknown. To address the aforementioned gap, this study bases on transactive memory systems (TMS) and shared temporal cognitions (STC) to conduct an introductory review on the theories and concepts in the SPT context and explore how a team’s TMS and STC may be applied in the conflictual SPT process to facilitate the tailoring performance.