CodeTalk Conversations about Code

Contemporary development environments do not directly and explicitly support developers in having a conversation about the code they write and maintain. This problem is aggravated when geographically dispersed teams need to collaborate on development artifacts. CodeTalk allows developers to have conversations about source code elements. They can mark code sections they are concerned about and annotate them. These annotations provide entry points for an informal discourse about the strengths and weaknesses of these sections and developers can work towards a conclusion on how to proceed on the raised issues. A Squeak/Smalltalk implementation of CodeTalk was evaluated by several small development teams, indicating improvement in the informal assessment of code.