Understanding Interaction and Communication Challenges Present

in Software Engineering

Sergey Masyagin, Giancarlo Succi

, Soﬁia Yermolaieva

and Nadezhda Zagvozkina

Innopolis University, Russia

Keywords:

Communication in Software Engineering, Verbal and Nonverbal Communication, Systemic Theory,

Democratic Theory.

Abstract:

Researchers have largely identiﬁed that interactions and communications pose major challenges in software

development, especially when extracting requirements. However, they have not appreciated the sources and the

depth of them, thus approaching them with mechanisms that have not (fully) achieved the desired objectives.

In this position, we claim that such challenges can be explained using three major theories coming from social

sciences: the theory of verbal and nonverbal communication, systemic theory, and democratic theory. We

also argue that some of the successful practices of agile methods can be explained in terms of these theories.

Finally, we stipulate that a full appreciation of these theories can result in a signiﬁcant leap forward in the

discipline, identifying new mechanisms that can help to overcome the mentioned challenges, understanding

fully what we are doing and why.

1 INTRODUCTION

Software engineering has been plagued since its early

days by what has been called the “Software Crisis”

that is, the rapid increase of computational power of

hardware machines and complexity of approachable

problems in parallel of no adequate methods to ap-

proach the creation of the solution to such problems

(Science Committee, 1968). Despite more than 50

years of work, the problem still exists and has been

renewed. In the Chaos report conducted in 2015, it

was identiﬁed that only 29% of projects are success-

ful by the above-mentioned criteria (Standish Group,

2015). Fitzerald (Fitzgerald, 2012) redeﬁned the cur-

rent problems as “Software Crisis 2.0”. This crisis

is based on the rise in both advanced hardware tech-

nologies and a huge amount of available data, which

opens various opportunities for customers while at the

same time cannot be addressed by the software due

to its limited capabilities. Both crises could be ex-

plained with the Wirth’s law that covers differences in

the evolution of software, that is getting slower much

faster comparing to the increasing evolution’s speed

of hardware (Wirth, 1995).

A core aspect of the software crisis is linked to

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8847-0186

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3198-6330

user involvement, incomplete and changing require-

ments which have been largely considered one of the

core factors that cause projects to fail both in the var-

ious version of the Standish Report (Standish Group,

2014) and in several other quite authoritative sources,

also in grey literature (360logica, 2019; Mooney,

2018). Rice and Perry state that unclear requirements

lead to the development of low-quality software (Rice

and Perry, 2011).

These kind of problems were among the key mo-

tivation for the development of agile methodologies

a couple of decades ago (Beck et al., 1999; Cock-

burn and Highsmith, 2001). All the different agile

approaches promote the interaction inside teams and

among teams, customers, and (other) key stakehold-

ers.

However, all of the above-mentioned challenges

still exist. Moreover, indeed agile methods have un-

doubtedly contributed to the improvement of the de-

velopment process. However, even if they are now

overwhelmed accepted, root causes of such problems

have not been studied, but just proposed solutions that

have been veriﬁed to empirically work in several case

(Ceschi et al., 2005; di Bella et al., 2013).

In this proposal, we want to present a framework

to describe such problem and also, to be provocative,

argue why we think that some of the well-established

approaches to address the software crises simply can-

572

Masyagin, S., Succi, G., Yermolaieva, S. and Zagvozkina, N.

Understanding Interaction and Communication Challenges Present in Software Engineering.

DOI: 10.5220/0009581905720578

In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering (ENASE 2020), pages 572-578

ISBN: 978-989-758-421-3

not work.

We root our position in three theories coming from

social sciences: the theory of verbal and nonverbal

communication, systemic theory, and democratic the-

ory.

We claim that such theories can explain the

challenges faced in interactions and communications

while developing software. Moreover, we evidence

that the progress made by agile methods are clear

consequences of these theories. Finally, we stipulate

that a full appreciation of these theories can result in

a signiﬁcant leap forward in the discipline, identify-

ing new mechanisms that can help to overcome the

mentioned challenges, understanding fully what we

are doing and why.

This paper is organized as follows. Section 2

present the background theories of our investigation,

and, in particular, Section 2.1 presents the differences

between verbal and nonverbal communication, Sec-

tion 2.2 outlines systemic theory, and Section 2.3

summarised the principles of democratic theory. Sec-

tions 3, 4, and 5 analyze the implication of verbal

and nonverbal communications, systemic theory, and

democratic theory, respectively to software develop-

ment. Section 6 summarizes the results of our posi-

tion, and Section 7 draws some conclusion and out-

lines our future work in this area.

2 BACKGROUND

This section outlines the theories that we have used

to develop our position. Speciﬁcally, we are going to

cover:

• verbal and nonverbal communication,

• systemic theory,

• democratic theory.

2.1 Verbal and Nonverbal

Communication

The study of how people communicate started with

the work of Darwin (Darwin, 1873) about 150 years

ago and has taken a major vigor ﬁrst with the research

of Chapple (Chapple, 1939) and more recently with

the investigations of Kendon (Kendon, 1967).

It is now clear that interaction streams occur typi-

cally along two major channels: verbal and nonverbal

(Archer and Akert, 1977; Bugental et al., 1970), and

that there are concepts that cannot be explained by

verbal communication alone (DiMatteo et al., 1980).

Independently from the channel, the interaction con-

sists of two major sub-processes: message production

and message reception (Buck and VanLear, 2002).

Both of the sub-processes are peculiar for communi-

cation, which is a part of interactions, and three major

types of communication can be identiﬁed:

1. spontaneous nonverbal communication via ges-

tures and body language, which is involuntary and

biologically-based,

2. symbolic communication, that is intended, is

based on common socially deﬁned behavior and

held via a verbal channel,

3. pseudo-spontaneous communication, that is done

intentionally by the sender but used as a manipula-

tion to show that it is spontaneous for the receiver.

Nonverbal communication uses feelings and emotions

rather than verbal language. Hans and Hans (Hans

and Hans, 2015), in their paper, identiﬁed that this

channel consists of kinesics, head movements and

posture, and haptics.

Kinesics covers all human movements, including

all types of gestures, such as:

• emblems (gestures with agreed-on meaning),

• adaptors (biological or unconscious touches di-

rected toward self or other object),

• illustrators (representational accompaniment of a

verbal message) (Hans and Hans, 2015).

Head movement and posture, according to Hans and

Hans, except of obvious parts covered in the name of

this subﬁeld of nonverbal communication, also con-

tain eye contact and facial expression.

Haptics focuses on conscious touches with emo-

tional context, along with their intensity and fre-

quency.

There also exists another arguable component of

this channel - proxemics. While Hans and Hans iden-

tiﬁed proxemics as a unit of haptics, other authors

such as Hall et al. (Hall et al., 1968) consider it as a

distinct type of nonverbal communication. Proxemics

focuses on social space and distance as a factor that

inﬂuences communication.

When diving into the depth of verbal communi-

cation, we can see that it has a much simpler nature

comparing to nonverbal’s one. According to Salz-

mann (Salzmann, 1998) study of language and cul-

ture, we can conclude that this channel could be di-

vided into:

• vocal - spoken language,

• and nonvocal - verbal communication conducted

using sign languages, written communication, etc.

What combines these two channels of communica-

tion is - semiotics, that is a study of relationships be-

tween all types of verbal and nonverbal communica-

tion (Cobley, 2001).

Understanding Interaction and Communication Challenges Present in Software Engineering

573

2.2 Systemic Theory

Systemic theory aims at representing groups or soci-

eties of individuals or of other entities as a set of in-

terrelations between components, where the emerging

behavior is more than a planned sum of the behaviors

of the individuals, so that we cannot easily decompose

the interested reality into parts.

The theory was originally conceived by von Berta-

lanffy (Von Bertalanffy, 1972), and then evolved in

several directions, including biology, psychology, so-

ciology, engineering, etc.

It is particularly interesting the work that Bateson

has made in this area (Bateson, 1972). He states that

a common knowledge and so understanding does not

exist, because each knowledge requires interpretation

(Patton and McMahon, 2014). Every individual uses

their own interpretation framework, which is based

upon background experience and so hypothesis built

upon the experience. The opposite to the interpreta-

tion process is representation. To transfer any knowl-

edge or information using language, art, or etc. people

tend to use the same framework and settled patterns

the understanding. Representing and understanding

are typical community processes.

Another signiﬁcant aspect of the systemic theory

that should be considered is a near decomposability of

entities. Simon (Simon, 1969) states that this concept

is used to develop hierarchical systems with indepen-

dent subsystems that will have only aggregate depen-

dencies on the other subsystems. In the society with

high variability of entities (members), near decom-

posability can help to develop an organization, that

won’t be affected in case of problems with any entity

or its change to another one (Wagner and Altenberg,

1996). As an opposite structure, we can conclude that

in non-decomposable systems, all entities have a sig-

niﬁcant impact on each other and the overall system.

Any problem with an entity in such a system will lead

to critical issues.

2.3 Democratic Theory

Democratic Theory is a ﬁeld of political theory that

aims to consider society, choices they make, and face

along with their consequences (Ansolabehere, 2001).

There are various approaches to democratic theory,

Dahl (Dahl, 1956) identiﬁed the following:

• Madisonian,

• Populistic,

• Polyarchal,

• Equality, Diversity and Intensity,

• and American Hybrid.

Besides different approaches to democratic theory

there are different democracy types to analyze. In

the paper, we consider participatory democracy which

bases on social dialog and collaboration (Moote et al.,

1997).

One of the characteristics of a participatory and

democratic community is an involvement of all mem-

bers into a rational public opinion development. All

society members participate and contribute to de-

cision making process (Moote et al., 1997). One

of the methods to achieve such meaningful involve-

ment is equivalent enlightenment. According to Lass-

well (Lasswell, 1948), equivalent enlightenment is the

same level of attention and understanding to the spec-

iﬁed goal between layman, experts, and leaders. He

also states that equivalent commitment in the demo-

cratic society is achieved by setting down a common

goal and its equal wide-spreading by equivalent en-

lightenment among all social groups.

3 VERBAL AND NONVERBAL

COMMUNICATION IN

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

We have often heard that a key problem in require-

ment is that a human does not express their require-

ments in a non-ambiguous way. Therefore we need to

deﬁne ways to be more stringent in such deﬁnition, so

to limit such problems.

As an example of this it is enough to check the

works of highly cited software engineering scholars,

like, for instance, Berry, from (Berry and Berry, 1983)

to (Hadar et al., 2019), Finkelstein from (Finkel-

stein, 1991) to (Finkelstein, 2013), Mylopolous from

(Greenspan and Borgida, 1982) to (Guarino et al.,

2019), again just mentioning in alphabetic order

three outstanding researchers in software engineering

throughout their career. Moreover, in a recent work,

it has been evidenced that the vast majority of the re-

search in the ﬁeld is concentrated in trying to repre-

sent the requirements formally (Ivanov et al., 2017).

This approach has already been partially con-

trasted with the approaches present in agile methods.

There, on one side, it is clearly said that changes in

requirements are welcomed – the ﬁrst book of Kent

Beck on eXtreme Programming contains as subti-

tle “Embrace Change” (Beck, 1999). On the other

side, it is claimed that more precise requirements are

achieved via more direct interactions between devel-

opers, customers, and managers – in the Agile Man-

ifesto, it is written “Individuals and interactions over

processes and tools” (Beck et al., 1999).

ENASE 2020 - 15th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering

574

However, we think that we can go further. We

claim that addressing requirements ambiguity via al-

ways more formal methods ignore the fact that we,

humans, communicate not only verbally but also non-

verbally. And as it has been explained previously in

Section 2.1., not all the nonverbal communication can

be expressed in terms of verbal communication. As

such, the formal approach is intrinsically ﬂawed. On

the contrary, trying to involve in face-to-face meet-

ings, customers, managers, and developers does ad-

dress the problem since it extends to modes of com-

munication, and such an ampler communication spec-

trum may help substantially in reducing ambiguity.

Needless to say that, anyway, since requirements

are elicited and understood in social structures, they

are intrinsically volatile. More on this in Section 4

4 SYSTEMIC THEORY IN

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

In addition to the problem of verbal and nonverbal

communication, a further explanation of the ambigu-

ous interpretations of requirements can come from

how they are actually elicited, taking advantage of

systemic theory.

For instance, it is not uncommon that the needs

of the same customer are extracted by different ana-

lysts. Systemic theory evidences that understanding

is a social process that relates to how people inter-

act (Bateson, 1972). Indeed, under such perspective,

requirements extracted individually or in pairs (cus-

tomer,analyst) are intrinsic ﬂawed.

If we compare our approach to art, then when

making their masterpieces artists typically use their

own way of representation and the spectators of such

works dive into the mind of the artists to understand

it – this is often not an easy process and requires “in-

terpreters,” and actually there could be lengthy dis-

cussions what should be the authentic interpretation.

Therefore, a person who reads the requirement uses

his/her way to understand (interpret) it.

The process could be compared to the encoding

and decoding of the information by two systems us-

ing different algorithms. Altogether, ambiguity in

requirements may also happen because of what sys-

temic theorists call “cognitively inconsistent behavior

and thoughts” of the people involved in the process

of their development and interpretation since they

belong to disjoint communities of meaning(Bateson,

1972).

Systemic theory is also very important to under-

stand the composition of development teams. Let’s

consider a software organization as a system with en-

tities and relations among them, which follows a soft-

ware development life-cycle (Ruparelia, 2010), which

may differ locally in the different components (a.k.a.

subsystems) of the organization but share the same

paramount goal (Pressman and Maxim, 2014). Such

a goal is commonly documented as requirements and

speciﬁcation documents, which further will be used

for development and veriﬁcation.

According to the systemic theory, such a system

could be decomposable if its different subsystems can

handle every phase of the software life-cycle. How-

ever, if some subsystems are unable to do so, the

system becomes not decomposable or only partly de-

composable. Indeed, most systems made of knowl-

edge workers tend to be at most only partially de-

composable. The only partial decomposability has a

huge implication in the division of work, which is,

indeed, based on communication and interactions be-

tween key stakeholders. Such implications also ex-

tend to the individual artifacts of the process devel-

oped at every phase (Gasevic et al., 2009).

Indeed, the adoption of agile methods implies a

higher level of decomposability, since there is a higher

level of sharing and of communication, as we have

previously discussed.

5 DEMOCRATIC THEORY IN

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

In a software organization as a democratic society,

people are involved in a decision-making process. In

organizations that follow agile-based approaches to

software development team itself performs decision

making, discussion, and accomplishing itself (Basa-

hel, 2014) (Wan and R., 2010).

An interesting question is why we should involve

people in the decision-making process? To answer

this question, we should dive into the process itself.

In a discussion, all members suggest their opinions,

which are further argued, and as a result, they make

the optimal or the best-suited decision. The critical

point of the whole decision-making is not only an

identiﬁcation of a solution to some problem but an

involvement of every member in its development, so

that shared responsibility will be achieved.

Besides, collective responsibility, that guarantee

commitment to the project, decision making can also

be considered a technique for equivalent enlighten-

ment as all members will be in the same context and

will have a compatible level of attention.

So, if to go back to the problem of “unclear re-

quirements” we can conclude that the same level of

immersion into the context through the development

Understanding Interaction and Communication Challenges Present in Software Engineering

575

Table 1: Theory and problems it explains.

Theory Problem

Verbal and nonverbal com-

munication

• Written document (verbal) cannot fully express the meaning of re-

quirements, since there is a need of a nonverbal communication chan-

nels.

Systemic Theory • Software organization are only quasi decomposable, therefore, re-

quirements are intrinsically volatile.

• “Cognitively inconsistent behaviour and thoughts” of all the stake-

holders and developers involved in the deﬁnition of requirements may

cause them not to be properly understood.

Democratic Theory • Different level of enlightenment among people who operate with re-

quirements can make such requirements ambiguous.

of equivalent enlightenment among people who oper-

ate in any way with requirements could solve it.

6 SUMMARY OF THE POSITION

A software crisis exists, and we can not argue with

a set of existing challenges that slower evolution of

the whole software engineering sphere, but we can try

to go deep into every particular issue to understand

its roots. An understanding is the ﬁrst and the hard-

est step towards the development of a solution, that is

why we are trying to look at the challenges described

in Section 1 from the various angles. We considered

the issues from the perspective of the social sciences.

The results of our analysis on problems and theories

that explain them are presented in Table 1.

7 CONCLUSIONS AND FURTHER

WORK

In this paper, we have outlined three theories of so-

cial sciences that can explain the problem in interac-

tions and communication present in software devel-

opment, and we have seen how such theories can ex-

plain some of the advantages of agile methods. To

move this work from a position to a full research we

need now to validate systematically (some of) our

ﬁndings. We plan, therefore, to launch a session of

focus groups and of interviews with software devel-

opers, managers, and customers on this topic. To this

end, we plan to take advantage of the strategic loca-

tion of Innopolis University, which is surrounded by a

large and rich variety of software companies located

inside the city of Innopolis.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Innopolis University for generously funding

this research.

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