Supporting Shared Understanding in Asynchronous Communication Contexts

Abstract

[Context and motivation] The success of software projects depends on developing a system that satisfies the stakeholders’ wishes and needs according to their mental models of the intended system. However, stakeholders may have different or misaligned mental models of the same system, resulting in conflicting requirements. For this reason, aligned mental models and thus a shared understanding of the project vision is essential for the success of software projects. [Question/problem] While it is already challenging to achieve shared understanding in synchronous contexts, such as meetings, it is even more challenging when only asynchronous contexts, like messaging services, are possible. When multiple stakeholders are involved from different locations and time zones, primarily asynchronous communication occurs. Despite the frequent use of software tools, like Confluence, to support asynchronous contexts, their use for the development of a shared understanding has hardly been analyzed. [Principal ideas/results] In this paper, we propose five concepts to help stakeholders develop a shared understanding in asynchronous communication contexts. We assess the adaptability of three existing software tools to our concepts, adapt these software tools accordingly, and develop our own prototype that implements all five concepts. In an experiment with 30 participants, we evaluate these four software tools and compare them to a control group that had no support in developing a shared understanding. [Contribution] Our results show the suitability of our concepts, as the participants using our concepts were able to achieve a higher level of shared understanding compared to the control group.