Auto-Erecting Virtual Office Walls : Constructing a Virtual Office for Global Software Engineers

Abstract

Due to the globalization of business and the rising popularity of working from home, global software engineering is becoming increasingly common. In such a distributed environment, team members no longer share a physical work environment and should be provided with information they need to collaborate remotely. The goal of this dissertation is to support global software engineers with technological support for aiding them to relatively passively and unobtrusively acquire a sufficient level of awareness for their work activities. To reach this goal three important aspects of the design, implementation and evaluation of such technological support are studied, namely: constructing a virtual office, communicating in a virtual office, and information needs in a virtual office. The results of these empirical studies, conducted in close collaboration with industry, provide valuable insights on how best to design and implement a virtual office, empirical evidence that overhearing conversations of colleagues is valuable, empirical evidence that a mood-based microblogging solution increases team-connectedness, and empirical evidence that virtual office walls increase the speed of coordination and the perception on overall performance. Finally, based on these studies, a set of requirements a virtual office should fulfill is derived. This set of requirements provides important guidelines on how best to provide global software engineers with the information they need.