Notifications management in distributed development environments: A case study

Abstract

Interruptions in distributed development environments, caused by notifications, are increasingly necessary during collaborations between developers. This paper introduces the interruptions management problem and presents a solution integrated into the design and management of notifications in a social software development environment called SCI. The paper provides a classification of notification types, and reports results from a study testing SCI's effectiveness and usability. The study explored the effect of managing interruptions with the proposed features on the teams and their progress.