Supporting Group Awareness in Distributed Software Development

Collaborative software development presents a variety of coordination and communication problems, particularly when teams are geographically distributed. One reason for these problems is the difficulty of staying aware of others – keeping track of information about who is working on the project, who is active, and what tasks people have been working on. Current software development environments do not show much information about people, and developers often must use text-based tools to determine what is happening in the group. We have built a system that assists distributed developers in maintaining awareness of others. ProjectWatcher observes fine-grained user edits and presents that information visually on a representation of a project’s artifacts. The system displays general awareness information and also provides a resource for more detailed questions about others’ activities.