Group awareness in distributed software development

• DOI: 10.1145/1031607.1031621
• Publication Date: 2005-01-30T17:58:48Z
• Authors: Carl Gutwin; Reagan Penner; Kevin Schneider
• Keywords: Distributed development; Collaborative software

Open-source software development projects are almost always collaborative and distributed. Despite the difficulties imposed by distance, these have managed to produce large, complex, successful systems. However, there is still little known about how open-source teams manage their collaboration. In this paper we look at one aspect of issue: distributed developers maintain group awareness. We interviewed developers, read project communication, looked artifacts from three open source projects. found that do need awareness another, they both a general entire team more detailed knowledge people plan work with. Although several sources information, maintained primarily through text-based communication (mailing lists chat systems). These textual channels characteristics help support maintenance awareness, as long committed reading making public.