Regulation as an Enabler for Collaborative Software Development

Collaboration has become an integral aspect of software engineering. The widespread availability and adoption of social channels has led to a culture where today´s developers participate and collaborate more frequently with one another. Awareness is widely accepted as an important feature of collaboration, but exactly what this encompasses and how processes and tools should be evaluated in terms of their awareness support remains an open challenge. In this paper, we borrow a theory of regulation from the Learning Science domain and show how this theory can be used to provide more detailed insights into how collaboration tools and processes can be compared and analyzed.