Supporting distributed software engineering in a fully distributed organization

Software engineering is increasingly carried out in distributed settings. Software engineers are becoming more nomadic in carrying out their work, working from the customer location, the headquarters of their own company, their home, or sometimes even from their holiday locations. Technological support is needed to overcome the negative impacts of distance that are introduced by this trend. The central theme in this paper for supporting dislocated software engineers lies in increasing their awareness level to a level similar to (or even exceeding) what they experience in a co-located setting. In this paper we present the context in which we are bootstrapping a custom fit environment to support a team of fully dislocated software engineers and the incremental process we use. By working in this fashion we are discovering the requirements to support fully distributed teams while at the same time providing our setting with working solutions to help them with their day to day challenges. Finally, this continuous practical use also provides us with empirical data to validate the increase in awareness levels of dislocated software engineers and helps us in pinpointing important open research challenges.