What Distributed Software Teams Need to Know and When: An Empirical Study

Just like in co-located teams, software engineers in distributed teams need a variety of information about the project and their team members to collaborate effectively. In contrast with the co-located situation however, acquiring and maintaining sufficient awareness is more difficult. Therefore technological support is developed to assist them with this. However, such support walks a fine line: if it provides too little information software engineers will not be able to collaborate effectively, yet if it provides too much, an information overload can occur. To further complicate matters, the information needs of software engineers dynamically change based on their current activity, context and focus. Therefore we assist tool developers by investigating and reporting on the prioritization of information for distributed software engineers based on their current activity and status. Finally, we illustrate the applicability of the findings by describing how to apply them in a support tool for distributed software engineers.