Group awareness in distributed software development

ABSTRACT

Open-source software development projects are almost always collaborative and distributed. Despite the difficulties imposed by distance, these projects have managed to produce large, complex, and 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 this issue: 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 do need to maintain awareness of one another, and that they maintain both a general awareness of the entire team and more detailed knowledge of people that they plan to work with. Although there are several sources of information, this awareness is maintained primarily through text-based communication (mailing lists and chat systems). 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.

REFERENCES

• 1: Mark S. Ackerman , Leysia Palen, The Zephyr Help Instance: promoting ongoing activity in a CSCW system, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: common ground, p.268-275, April 13-18, 1996, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada [doi>10.1145/238386.238528]
• 2: Mark S. Ackerman , Brian Starr , Debby Hindus , Scott D. Mainwaring, Hanging on the ‘wire: a field study of an audio-only media space, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), v.4 n.1, p.39-66, March 1997 [doi>10.1145/244754.244756]
• 3: Steve Benford , John Bowers , Lennart E. Fahlén , Chris Greenhalgh , Dave Snowdon, User embodiment in collaborative virtual environments, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.242-249, May 07-11, 1995, Denver, Colorado, United States [doi>10.1145/223904.223935]
• 4: Elizabeth F. Churchill , Sara Bly, It's all in the words: supporting work activites with lightweight tools, Proceedings of the international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work, p.40-49, November 14-17, 1999, Phoenix, Arizona, United States [doi>10.1145/320297.320302]
• 5: Alan Dix , Janet Finlay , Gregory Abowd , Russell Beale, Human-computer interaction, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1997
• 6: Paul Dourish , Victoria Bellotti, Awareness and coordination in shared workspaces, Proceedings of the 1992 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work, p.107-114, November 01-04, 1992, Toronto, Ontario, Canada [doi>10.1145/143457.143468]
• 7: Margaret S. Elliott , Walt Scacchi, Free software developers as an occupational community: resolving conflicts and fostering collaboration, Proceedings of the 2003 international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work, November 09-12, 2003, Sanibel Island, Florida, USA [doi>10.1145/958160.958164]
• 8: Geraldine Fitzpatrick , Simon Kaplan , Tim Mansfield , Arnold David , Bill Segall, Supporting Public Availability and Accessibility with Elvin: Experiences and Reflections, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, v.11 n.3, p.447-474, 2002 [doi>10.1023/A:1021226206564]
• 9: Jon Froehlich , Paul Dourish, Unifying Artifacts and Activities in a Visual Tool for Distributed Software Development Teams, Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Software Engineering, p.387-396, May 23-28, 2004
• 10: Carl Gutwin , Saul Greenberg, A Descriptive Framework of Workspace Awareness for Real-Time Groupware, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, v.11 n.3, p.411-446, 2002 [doi>10.1023/A:1021271517844]
• 11: Christian Heath , Marina Jirotka , Paul Luff , Jon Hindmarsh, Unpacking collaboration: the interactional organisation of trading in a city dealing room, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, v.3 n.2, p.147-165, 1994/1995 [doi>10.1007/BF00773445]
• 12: James D. Herbsleb , Audris Mockus , Thomas A. Finholt , Rebecca E. Grinter, Distance, dependencies, and delay in a global collaboration, Proceedings of the 2000 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, p.319-328, December 2000, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States [doi>10.1145/358916.359003]
• 13: James D. Herbsleb , Rebecca E. Grinter, Architectures, Coordination, and Distance: Conway's Law and Beyond, IEEE Software, v.16 n.5, p.63-70, September 1999 [doi>10.1109/52.795103]
• 14: William C. Hill , James D. Hollan , Dave Wroblewski , Tim McCandless, Edit wear and read wear, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.3-9, May 03-07, 1992, Monterey, California, United States [doi>10.1145/142750.142751]
• 15: Edwin Hutchins, The technology of team navigation, Intellectual teamwork: social and technological foundations of cooperative work, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Mahwah, NJ, 1990
• 16: Robert E. Kraut , Lynn A. Streeter, Coordination in software development, Communications of the ACM, v.38 n.3, p.69-81, March 1995 [doi>10.1145/203330.203345]
• 17: David W. McDonald , Mark S. Ackerman, Just talk to me: a field study of expertise location, Proceedings of the 1998 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, p.315-324, November 14-18, 1998, Seattle, Washington, United States [doi>10.1145/289444.289506]
• 18: Two case studies of open source software development: Apache and Mozilla, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), v.11 n.3, p.309-346, July 2002 [doi>10.1145/567793.567795]
• 19: Andrew F. Monk , Leon A. Watts, Peripheral participants in mediated communication, CHI 98 conference summary on Human factors in computing systems, p.285-286, April 18-23, 1998, Los Angeles, California, United States [doi>10.1145/286498.286765]
• 20: Blair Nonnecke , Jenny Preece, Lurker demographics: counting the silent, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.73-80, April 01-06, 2000, The Hague, The Netherlands [doi>10.1145/332040.332409]
• 21: Norman, D., Things That Make Us Smart, Addison, 1993.
• 22: Judith S. Olson , Stephanie Teasley, Groupware in the wild: lessons learned from a year of virtual collocation, Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, p.419-427, November 16-20, 1996, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/240080.240353]
• 23: Eric S. Raymond , Tim O'Reilly, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., Sebastopol, CA, 1999
• 24: T. Schümmer, Lost and Found in Software Space, Proceedings of the 34th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences ( HICSS-34)-Volume 9, p.9066, January 03-06, 2001
• 25: Segal, L., Designing Team Workstations: The Choreography of Teamwork, in Local Applications of the Ecological Approach to Human-Machine Systems, P. Hancock, J. Flach, J. Caird and K. Vicente ed., Erlbaum, 1995, 392--415.
• 26: Stephanie Teasley , Lisa Covi , M. S. Krishnan , Judith S. Olson, How does radical collocation help a team succeed?, Proceedings of the 2000 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, p.339-346, December 2000, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States [doi>10.1145/358916.359005]
• 27: Steve Whittaker , David Frohlich , Owen Daly-Jones, Informal workplace communication: what is it like and how might we support it?, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: celebrating interdependence, p.131-137, April 24-28, 1994, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/191666.191726]
• 28: Steve Whittaker, Talking to strangers: an evaluation of the factors affecting electronic collaboration, Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, p.409-418, November 16-20, 1996, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/240080.240352]
• 29: Steve Whittaker , Loren Terveen , Will Hill , Lynn Cherny, The dynamics of mass interaction, Proceedings of the 1998 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, p.257-264, November 14-18, 1998, Seattle, Washington, United States [doi>10.1145/289444.289500]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces
          Subjects: Computer-supported cooperative work

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors

Keywords:
OSS, collaborative software development, group awareness