Auto-erecting virtual office walls

Collaborative Software Engineering is increasingly carried out from multiple, physically separated, locations around the globe. Software engineers are no longer tied to a fixed work-place and have the opportunity to work from the location of the customer, their home and even from their holiday location. When working in such a distributed setting, software engineers also need information about the context in which they are working to be able to collaborate effectively with their colleagues. In the last decades multiple technological solutions were developed by the Software Engineering community to fulfill this need. However, the majority of these solutions only support a single aspect of the development process, so each developer has to manually analyze, filter and combine the available information in order to acquire a sufficient level of awareness. Manually analyzing, filtering and combining available information can however be quite time-consuming and therefore we focus on how to automate this process. In this paper we present our vision on how auto-erected virtual office walls can help distributed software engineers to relatively passively and unobtrusively accomplish this automation.