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Towards Understanding Team Congestion in Large-Scale Software Development
Blekinge Institute of Technology, Faculty of Computing, Department of Software Engineering.ORCID iD: 0000-0003-1350-7030
Blekinge Institute of Technology, Faculty of Computing, Department of Software Engineering.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-1729-5154
2026 (English)In: Product-Focused Software Process Improvement: 26th International Conference, PROFES 2025, Salerno, Italy, December 1–3, 2025, Proceedings / [ed] Scanniello G., Romano S., Francese R., Lenarduzzi V., Vegas S., Springer Science+Business Media B.V., 2026, p. 353-368Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

Background: Software Development organisations tend to organise the development of software-intensive products and services as a constellation of components meant to be developed and maintained by independent, autonomous teams. However, the maintenance and evolution of said products and services require team collaboration and coordination. This collaboration and coordination overhead piles on top of teams’ workload, often hindering teams’ throughput and lead time. Objectives: This paper aims to discuss how the use of pull request data can help identify congested teams when the arrival of new tasks exceeds the team’s ability to close them. To do so, we have conducted an empirical study in a software development organisation developing a large-scale product, to try to characterise congested teams and the characteristics of the code reviews they are involved in. Method: We have conducted a case study to start exploring how code review data can help us model team congestion, and understand whether the features of the code-review network, or the team type (platform vs product), can have a major impact on team congestion. Results: The results show that teams seem to experience varying levels of congestion based on pull request activity, with some indicating potential congestion. However, increased PR accumulation did not consistently lead to longer lead times, as seen in some teams where high PR backlogs did not significantly impact delivery cadence. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that while PR data can indicate potential congestion, its impact on lead time varies across teams. Both technical factors and unobserved contextual elements shape congestion. Deeper insights require combining repository metrics with qualitative inputs. 

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Springer Science+Business Media B.V., 2026. p. 353-368
Series
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, ISSN 0302-9743 ; 16361
Keywords [en]
Case Study, Code-Review Data Analysis, Team Congestion, Team Coordination, Codes (symbols), Data reduction, Human resource management, Traffic congestion, Case-studies, Code review, Code-review data analyze, Large-scales, Leadtime, Product and services, Software development organizations, Team collaboration, Software design
National Category
Software Engineering
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:bth-28991DOI: 10.1007/978-3-032-12089-2_22Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105023305765ISBN: 9783032120885 (print)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:bth-28991DiVA, id: diva2:2020976
Conference
26th International Conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement, PROFES 2025, Salerno, Dec 1-3, 2025
Part of project
SERT- Software Engineering ReThought, Knowledge Foundation
Funder
Knowledge Foundation, 20180010Available from: 2025-12-12 Created: 2025-12-12 Last updated: 2025-12-12Bibliographically approved

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