Evaluating the Effect of 3D World Integration within a Social Software Environment

Several virtual communities have spread during the last decade where hundreds of people interact and socialize. Users use these communities in many fields including education, health, business, and entertainment. They use them to communicate, share information, and collaborate to achieve common goals and finish their tasks. To our knowledge, no existing literature or research studies show the benefit of using virtual world in 1) improving software engineering education, 2) enhancing the collaboration in distributed software development environment, and 3) increasing their effectiveness in the distributed developers´ progress. For this purpose we conducted a case study to test effect of integrating a virtual environment called CVE in software development environments. This study presents both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data collected from the case study surveys and log files. It conducted a survey on the users´ preferences a. Also, it collected data about the developer´s interactions with the 3D objects, and analyzed the collected results.