A Group Awareness and collaboration in Distributed Software Development

.Open-source software development projects manage to produce large, robust, complex, and successful systems. OSS are always collaborative and distributed in nature as well as diff iculties are being occurred due to distance. However, there is a little spite of know ledge about management of collaboration by open-source team. In this paper we look how distributed developers maintain group awareness. We interviewed developers, read project communication, and looked at project artifacts from three successful open source projects. We found that distributed developers need to maintain aw areness of one another, and that they maintain both a general aw areness of the entire team and more detailed know ledge of people w ith whom they plan to w ork. Collaborative software development presents a variety of coordination and communication problems, particularly when teams are geographically distributed. One reason for these problems is the diff iculty of staying aware of others – keeping track of information about who is working on the project, who is active, and people have been working w ith which task. Current software development environments do not show much information about people, and developers often must use text-based tools to determine w hat is happening in the group. We have built a system that assists distributed developers in maintaining aw areness of others. Although there are several sources of information, this awareness is maintained pr imarily through textbased communication these textual channels have several characteristics that help to support the maintenance of awareness, as long as developers are committed to reading the lists and to making their project communication public.