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Group awareness in distributed software development

Published: 06 November 2004 Publication History

Abstract

Open-source software development projects are almost always collaborative and distributed. Despite the difficulties imposed by distance, these projects have managed to produce large, complex, and successful systems. However, there is still little known about how open-source teams manage their collaboration. In this paper we look at one aspect of this issue: how distributed developers maintain group awareness. We interviewed developers, read project communication, and looked at project artifacts from three successful open source projects. We found that distributed developers do need to maintain awareness of one another, and that they maintain both a general awareness of the entire team and more detailed knowledge of people that they plan to work with. Although there are several sources of information, this awareness is maintained primarily through text-based communication (mailing lists and chat systems). These textual channels have several characteristics that help to support the maintenance of awareness, as long as developers are committed to reading the lists and to making their project communication public.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CSCW '04: Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
November 2004
644 pages
ISBN:1581138105
DOI:10.1145/1031607
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 06 November 2004

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Author Tags

  1. OSS
  2. collaborative software development
  3. group awareness

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CSCW04
CSCW04: Computer Supported Cooperative Work
November 6 - 10, 2004
Illinois, Chicago, USA

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CSCW '04 Paper Acceptance Rate 53 of 176 submissions, 30%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

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  • (2024)Understanding Real-Time Collaborative Programming: A Study of Visual Studio Live ShareACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/364367233:4(1-28)Online publication date: 27-Jan-2024
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