Context-Based Notification Supporting Distributed Software Teams Management and Coordination

Abstract

Global Software Development introduced many competitive advantages, however, these advantages brought new challenges together, specially when we talk about communication issues and, consequently, collaborative work participants coordination and management. In this sense, awareness techniques and context management can be used to offer information to project participants, making them perceive the context where workspace actions are occurring. This paper presents DiSEN-Notifier, a notification manager that uses contextual data to send information to collaborative work participants within a distributed software engineering environment. DiSEN-Notifier uses event-based notification, and does not require users to request the information. It also identifies - based on context - who are the participants interested on a specific information keeping them aware of any change at the moment it occurs.