Impact of collaborative traces on trustworthiness

We investigated how trust among software developers would be affected by providing them with visualizations of collaborative traces. We define collaborative traces to be representations of the past and current activity of a group of developers manipulating software development artifacts. In this paper, we report two main findings. First, we report the results of our controlled experiment in which collaborative traces were visualized. Second, we present an overview of tools which aim to represent collaborative software engineering traces. Our experiment provides evidence that collaborative traces can support the development of several factors of trust identified in our field study. However, we also identified some shortcomings of our current visualizations, gaining insights into future improvements. From our review of tools that represent collaborative traces, we observed that such representations can drive the design of tools that aim to support trust. We also present a table of tools; the table can be used to guide discussion and the design of tools that promote trust in software development.