Abstract
The awareness of others’ activities has been widely recognized as essential in facilitating coordination in a team among Computer-Supported Cooperative Work communities. Several field studies of software developers in large software companies such as Microsoft have shown that coworker and artifact awareness are the most common information needs for software developers; however, they are also two of the seven most frequently unsatisfied information needs. To address this problem, we built a workspace awareness tool named TeamWATCH to visualize developer activities using a 3-D city metaphor. In this paper, we discuss the importance of awareness in software development, review existing workspace awareness tools, present the design and implementation of TeamWATCH, and evaluate how it could help detect and resolve conflicts earlier and better maintain group awareness via a controlled experiment. The experimental results showed that the subjects using TeamWATCH performed significantly better with respect to early conflict detection and resolution.
Highlights
As reported in [1], software engineers spend approximately 70% of their time on cooperative activities; collaboration is essential for software development
To help software developers maintain group awareness and enhance their collaboration, we propose a workspace awareness tool based on a 3-D city metaphor called TeamWATCH (Team-based Workspace Awareness Toolkit and Collaboration Hub) [22,23]
TeamWATCH, a workspace awareness tool based on a 3-D city metaphor, was built to support visualizing both historical and real-time awareness info in a shared common view
Summary
As reported in [1], software engineers spend approximately 70% of their time on cooperative activities; collaboration is essential for software development. Collaboration is difficult since the intangible nature of software makes it challenging for software developers to create a common view among team members. A shared view of a software system can help developers better understand its complexity during collaboration and enable them to know more about how their work relates to that of others within the context of the entire system. With the progress of globalization and outsourcing, a growing number of software development projects are being geographically and temporally distributed, which increases the difficulty of collaboration since increasing the distance between team members usually leads to less effective communication [3,4]
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