25 November 2020 – SIT’s MSc graduate Vasilii Zorin and NUS’s Associate Professor Hahn Jungpil won the Best Paper award at the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) 2020.

The winning paper discusses the most effective organizational team structure to develop and deliver software products to the market faster. Zorin and Jungpil consider two different approaches to forming development teams: the customer-centered feature team and the system architecture-centered component team. The main difference between the two is that feature teams deliver fully integrated, “vertical” pieces of software to end-users, while component teams focus on specific software layers or modules.

Using computer simulation, Zorin and Jungpil show the importance of building software teams around customer needs at the early development stages. However, as the requirements environment becomes more complex, cross-team communications take priority.

The paper concludes with an important practical recommendation. Managers, who avoid high specialization of the feature teams and reduce cross-team communication overhead, can bring better results for moderately complex and complex software products.

To view Zorin’s research presentation or download the paper, please click here.

To read more in NUS's article, please click here.