Obtaining Requirements for Designing a Tool to Support Distributed Development

The Distributed Software Development involves various challenges, many of which are related to the lack of trust experienced by team members since they often do not know each other personally. Other problems which are already considered to be classic are related to communication, coordination and collaboration. Bearing in mind that providing information about co-workers may increase both the team spirit and the team members’ confidence in each other, we have carried out surveys to discover what information might be useful in attaining this objective, and to reduce those problems related to the three ‘c’s. The results of the questionnaires have been analyzed from different points of view, first by differentiating the respondents’ roles and then by analyzing their specific use in communication, coordination and control activities. The results of this analysis have allowed us to obtain the requirements needed to design a tool with which to support global software development. The implementation of this tool is also described in this paper.