Increasing awareness in distributed software teams: A first evaluation

Abstract

Similarly to co-located software engineering teams, teams in which developers work geographically distributed require a variety of information about the project, organization and team members to collaborate effectively. However, in such a setting, maintaining awareness at a sufficient level to collaborate optimally is generally more difficult. Therefore research has been done on the prioritization of information for distributed software engineers, based on their current activity and status. Based on this research a platform was developed incorporating a subset of the findings. In this paper we report on a first evaluation of the deployment of this platform in a distributed industrial case setting. The most important findings are that: (i) providing distributed software engineers with their information needs, appears to contribute to an increase in their overall level of awareness and (ii) information about project related communication with the customer and information about the happiness of colleagues adds the most value.