ASPIC: Awareness-based Support Project for Interpersonal Collaboration in Software Engineering Kevin Dullemond Delft University of Technology K.Dullemond@TUDelft.nl Ben van Gameren Delft University of Technology B.J.A.vanGameren@TUDelft.nl Advisor: Rini van Solingen Delft University of Technology D.M.vanSolingen@TUDelft.nl Abstract—Research the problems caused by the difficulties in GSE with acquiring and maintaining awareness: sufficient contextual information to be able to properly cooperate with others. Research Area - Awareness in collaborative Software Engi- neering I. RESEARCH PROBLEM In collaborative work it is essential to have knowledge about the context in which you are working to properly cooperate with others [1], [2]. With information about the context we mean information about the other members in the project team, their activities, information about the state of the project and so on. This information is essential be- cause this knowledge is necessary for coordinating actions, managing coupling, discussing tasks, anticipating others’ actions, and finding help [1], [2], [3]. The complexity and interdependency of software systems (e.g., [4]) suggest that this is also the case for collaborative software development. In scientific literature the term ’awareness’ is often used to denote this [1], [5]. Dourish et al. use the following definition: ”An understanding of the activities of others which provides a context for your own activity” [5]. Awareness information is distributed among the members of the project team as follows: Actors display information on a shared medium while other actors monitor the medium and acquire information from it [1]. In this process, both monitoring and displaying are activities that are not neces- sarily conducted with the full attention of the actor. Often when expressing this varying degree of attention dichotomies are used, such as: explicit versus implicit, deliberate versus automatic, conscious versus subconscious, focused versus unfocused and active versus passive. However, as empha- sized by Schmidt [1], the distinction between these notions is not categorical but merely one of degrees. When team members are not sharing a physical work environment they are outside of sensory range of each other. Therefore information exchange between them becomes infeasible without some kind of technological support. This can be dealt with by providing other ways of acquiring the required information, like using the telephone or email to ask a question. However, in general, such solutions are inferior to the way contextual information is shared in a traditional co-located setting, in the sense that in comparison it (i) takes more effort because the communication is more intentional [6], (ii) is more obtrusive [7], (iii) happens less frequently [8], [9] and (iv) contains less information [6], [10]. As such we can conclude that sharing awareness information is more difficult in a distributed setting. Due to the nature of the challenges associated with GSE, it is plausible to assume these challenges originate from having insufficient access to information regarding the work context: a lack of awareness. II. RESEARCH FOCUS The goal of ASPIC 1 is to develop solutions to the prob- lems caused by the difficulties with acquiring and main- taining awareness in GSE. In this research the focus will lie on making the sharing of information a more passive activity because (i) this will likely lower the effort to share awareness information, (ii) cause this information to be more recent and (iii) improve the quality of the information as well. To do this we will first identify the information from the context of a project that is important to coordinate and integrate the activities of the members of the development team. Following this we will select those information items for which there is a lot to gain with respect to sharing awareness information in a more passive way, and develop supporting technology to accomplish this. Summarizing, we can define the following three research questions 2 : RQ 1 : What types of contextual information are important in collaborative software engineering? RQ 2 : For which of those types is there a lot to gain with respect to sharing awareness information in a more passive way in a distributed environment? RQ 3 : How can sharing awareness information in a more passive way be valorized by technological support? III. EXISTING SUPPORTING TECHNOLOGY To further illustrate our intentions we will provide a few examples of technological solutions which make it possible to more passively share awareness information of a specific 1 See: http://www.aspic.ewi.tudelft.nl 2 Due to the early phase of this research, this document is a joint proposal. At a later time a subdivision will be defined.