Utilization of Online Collaborative Tools in Software Engineering: An Empirical Study on Review Meetings

Software development involves a significant amount of team effort where collaboration and communication of the team members are crucial. The team meetings are core activities in all stages of the software development process. Even though these meetings often are conducted face-to-face (F2F) with a lack of technology utilization, changing global conditions such as the COVID-19 pandemic require other solutions urgently without interrupting the software development schedule. For this purpose, online collaborative tools provide new opportunities for software teams to work together avoiding waste in time and resources and the relevant literature is immature. This study aims to assess the factors affecting the integration of online collaborative tools to SE practices with a special reference to review meetings. For this purpose, a sample of 73 SE sophomore and junior students who are future software professionals participated in experimental review meetings based on predefined scenarios. The findings indicate that the utilization of OCT’s has positive effects on the participants’ actual performance and improves the interaction between team members compared to F2F meetings.