Overhearing conversations in global software engineering - Requirements and an implementation

Conversations between colleagues in collaborative software engineering are important for coordinating work, sharing knowledge and creating knowledge. Overhearing conversations of others is useful as well since this: (i) provides access to the information discussed in the conversations, (ii) offers the possibility of joining the conversations and (iii) provides insight in the communication structure of the project team. However, when team members are geographically separated, tooling is needed to be able to support the overhearing of conversations between them. In this paper we present the requirements such tools should fulfill, discuss existing solutions and present our own implementation of such a tool: Communico.