Software development is a collaborative endeavor. From open source projects to corporate products, programmers engage in conversations with colleagues around the world about the complex software they are designing, building, testing, and fixing. Besides face-to-face interaction, developers use an assortment of collaborative tools inside and outside their integrated development environments (IDEs). These include formal tools accessible from the IDE, such as source code management and bug tracking systems, and also ad hoc ones available outside the IDE, such as email, instant messaging, and threaded conversation tools [10,19]. Non-collocated software teams, especially, face collaboration challenges. Indeed, as software teams become increasingly distributed, there is an increasing need for tools to support both structured and unstructured communication and coordination of work [11].
By: Susanne Hupfer; Li-Te Cheng; Steven Ross; John Patterson
Published in: RC23484 in 2005
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