Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
In summary, a CT analysis of requirements analysis suggests viewing the requirements analy-
sis process itself as a coordination mechanism for managing the usability of the software devel-
opment process for the end user. Within the process, developers must identify and manage
dependencies inherent in software requirements development, specifically dependencies between
tasks and actors with the knowledge to contribute to the tasks, producer/consumer dependencies
between requirements developers and programmers (especially with regards to usability), and
dependencies among requirements and features themselves.
COORDINATION THEORY: IMPACT
In this section, we will discuss the impact that CT has had in general and on MIS HCI in particu-
lar. A common way to measure the impact of a theory is by counting citations to the seminal arti-
cles. By this measure, CT has had a moderate impact, as the CT articles—the 1994 Computing
Surveys article (Malone and Crowston, 1994), an earlier conference paper (Malone and
Crowston, 1990), and working-paper versions (Malone, 1988; Malone and Crowston, 1991)—
have been cited in at least 287 journal articles, conference papers, and dissertations. This level of
citations is well above the average, though not as high as a citation classic, such as TAM (Davis,
1989), which has closer to 800 citations.
To better understand the impact of CT, we examined the use of CT in these publications in more
detail. In the remainder of this section, we will describe the method used to find and code citing
articles, then discuss the factors that seem to have contributed to the success that CT has enjoyed.
We conclude with a brief discussion of the progress that has been made on Malone and Crowston's
(1994) research agenda and suggestions of areas for further research.
Method
Citations were found by searching for citations to the CT articles mentioned above in the ISI Social
Science and Science Citation Indexes, which we accessed via Dialog. To find citations in confer-
ence papers and other sources not indexed by ISI, we also searched for citations in Citeseer
(http://citeseer.psu.edu/). These two sources provided a total of 287 references between 1989 (a
citation to the earliest working paper presentations of CT) through 2004. Note, though, that there
is a delay between publication and indexing by citation databases, meaning that the data for recent
years is likely incomplete. In addition, these two databases do not cover numerous sources, such as
topic chapters, such as those in Malone, Crowston, and Herman (2003), most of which cite Malone
and Crowston (1994). As a result, the count of citations should be considered a lower bound.
We next obtained abstracts and full text for as many of the articles as we could. We were able
to obtain the text for 232 of the articles. We then coded these articles according to the general
topic of the work, how the research reported used CT, and if the research extended CT in some
way. The coding system was developed through discussion among the authors to refine the defi-
nitions of the categories. Once we had come to agreement about how to code a subset of the arti-
cles, each author independently coded a portion of the remaining articles.
Findings: Uses of Coordination Theory
For how the research used CT, we coded articles into four categories, based on which of the three
contributions of Malone and Crowston (1994) contributed to the research.
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