Computer Supported Cooperative Work (2013) 22:113–158 © Springer 2012

DOI 10.1007/s10606-012-9164-4

Awareness Support in Distributed Software

Development: A Systematic Review and Mapping
of the Literature

Igor Steinmacher1,2, Ana Paula Chaves1 & Marco Aurélio Gerosa2

1
Coordination of Computer Sciences, Federal University of Technology—Paraná, BR 369–km 0,5
CEP: 87301-006, Caixa Postal: 271Campo Mourão, PR, Brazil (E-mail: igorfs@utfpr.edu.br; E-mail:
anachaves@utfpr.edu.br); 2Computer Science Department, University of São Paulo (USP),
Rua do Matão, 1010 CEP 05508-090 São Paulo, SP, Brazil (E-mail: igorfs@utfpr.edu.br;
E-mail: gerosa@ime.usp.br)

Abstract. The developers’ physical dispersion in Distributed Software Development (DSD)

imposes challenges related to awareness support during collaboration in such scenario. In this
paper, we present a systematic literature review and mapping that gathered, analyzed, and classified
studies that improve awareness support in DSD, providing an overview of the area. Our initial
search returned 1967 papers, of which 91 were identified as reporting some awareness support to
DSD. These papers were then analyzed, and classified according to the 3 C collaboration model and
to the Gutwin et al. Awareness Framework. Our findings suggest that awareness in DSD is gaining
increasingly attention, 71 out of 91 papers were published from 2006 to 2010. Most part of the
papers presented tools with some awareness support. The classification showed that the
coordination is by far the most supported dimension of the 3C model, while communication is
the less explored. It also showed that workspace awareness elements play a central role on DSD
collaboration.

Key words: Awareness, Communication, Coordination, Cooperation, Distributed software

development, Systematic mapping, Systematic review

1. Introduction
The software development industry has been gaining competitive advantage in
terms of cost and quality by using qualified professionals from all over the world
(Robinson and Kalakota 2004). This approach, called Distributed Software
Development (DSD), is based on geographically dispersed teams working
collaboratively in a software project. The software industry started obtaining—
in some cases—higher quality products at lower costs than that of collocated
teams (Jimenez et al. 2009).
In DSD, developers interact in a distributed way along the software lifecycle,
creating a network of distributed sub-teams. In some cases, these teams comprise
114 Igor Steinmacher et al.

members of the same organization; in others, they involve members from

different organizations. Therefore, DSD brings new challenges such as
contextual, cultural, organizational, geographical, temporal, language, and
political differences among developers (Ivcek and Galinac 2008). Traditional
face-to-face meetings become less common, and interaction among members
requires the use of technology to support communication, coordination, and
cooperation (Jimenez et al. 2009). Temporal distance hinders and limits
opportunities for direct contact, cooperation, and development of trust (Carmel
1999). Linguistic distance limits the ability for coherent communication (Jensen
et al. 2007). Communication and cooperation in DSD projects are normally
electronic with limited opportunities for synchronous contact, due to geographical
location and time zone differences (Casey 2010). Initiating casual interaction in
this scenario is difficult, since people do not see who is around, do not know if
others are available for conversation, and lack the awareness cues that naturally
lead to serendipitous interaction (Tee et al. 2009). The increasing adoption of
DSD and its characteristics raise several challenges and new opportunities for
research of new awareness support techniques, as well as the investigation of the
applicability of the existing ones. Due to the collaborative nature of DSD, team
members need to be aware of activities of others, progress of tasks, status of
artifacts, owners of artifacts, etc. The lack of awareness about what is happening
in other parts of the project leads to misunderstandings and errors, affecting the
work of the whole team (Gutwin et al. 2005).
A great number of studies and recent advances deal with awareness support in
distributed development environments (Steinmacher et al. 2010; Treude and
Storey 2010; Omoronyia et al. 2010). However, knowledge is scattered among
CSCW and Software Engineering literature. This article surveys the current state
of the art and highlights research directions, by means of a systematic review and
mapping. As a result, we offer an overview of the research area, which can be
used as a guide for researchers and practitioners looking for solutions or
challenges in DSD domain.
Systematic reviews gather and evaluate the available evidence concerning
specific topics (Mian et al. 2005). In contrast to the usual process of literature
review, a systematic review aims to reduce bias and follows a precise and strict
sequence of methodological steps that relies on a well-defined protocol. The
protocol presents the topic being investigated in a very specific, predefined,
focused, and structured question, as well as instructions for the selection,
analysis, and summarization of relevant papers. The systematic review aims to
present a fair evaluation of a research topic by using a trustworthy, rigorous, and
auditable methodology, increasing the likelihood of detecting effects that
individual smaller studies are unable to detect (Kitchenham 2004).
In this paper, our goal was to identify awareness studies and elements that aim
to improve the DSD scenario and classify them according to commonly used
groupware perspectives. For the purpose of analysis and classification, we used
Awareness Support in Distributed Software Development 115

the 3C Collaboration Model (Fuks et al. 2007) and the Awareness Framework
proposed by Gutwin et al. (1996). According to the former, the collaboration is
analyzed from communication, coordination, and cooperation points of view. The
latter defines a classification for awareness based on a list of elements that people
may keep track of when working with others in a shared space.
In addition to the systematic review, we also conducted a systematic mapping,
which provides an overview of a research area, identifies the quantity, type of
research, and results available within it (Petersen et al. 2008). The goal of our
systematic mapping was to check out the evolution of the research area, as well as
to find out in which forums the studies of the area are published, and who the
main researchers on the area are.
Thus, the main goals of this paper are: to organize and classify the high
number of papers found on this review; to provide a quick reference for DSD
environment developers and researchers regarding which awareness features have
already been investigated and implemented; and to identify missing coverage and
opportunities for possible future research. Our contributions also include:
characterization and synthesis of a research area; selection of relevant papers;
and comprehensive formulation and integration of findings by analysis of selected
papers.
This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents a discussion regarding
DSD, awareness, and the classification models used. Section 3 presents the
systematic mapping and review planning. Section 4 and Section 5 present the
results of our systematic mapping and review, respectively. Section 6 concludes
the paper, with a discussion about our findings and the limitations of our study.

2. Awareness in DSD
Awareness enables participants to pick up what their colleagues are doing and to
adjust their own individual activities accordingly. A deep discussion about the
concept of awareness is presented by Schmidt (2002). According to him,
awareness denotes the practices through which actors tacitly and seamlessly align
and integrate their distributed and yet interdependent activities. De Souza and
Redmiles (2011) state that although awareness has been usually associated with
individuals’ achievements, checking a tool log, receiving an email, or starting a
conversation are also valid examples of work practices deftly used by group
members to become aware of their colleagues’ actions.
DSD offers specific awareness requirements. During collaboration, developers
need to be aware of how particular tasks or project artifacts are progressing, what
fellow developers are (or have been) doing, and the current state of resources
associated to the project (Omoronyia et al. 2009a). According to Gutwin et al.
(2004), awareness is vital for distributed developers to coordinate their efforts,
smoothly add code, make changes that affect other parts of the code, and avoid
rework.
116 Igor Steinmacher et al.

Espinosa et al. (2007) state that geographic distances influence the effective-
ness of coordination because of: lack of familiarity with cross-site colleagues and
working environments, lean communication media, fewer opportunities for
interaction, and other geographically distributed collaboration problems (e.g.
poor telephone lines, time zones, language and cultural differences). The last
reasons listed are specific to distributed development on a global scale (Global
Software Development), when the teams are allocated in different countries. In
these cases, not only the physical distance, but also temporal and cultural
distances increase the difficulties of supporting awareness in computer systems.
The participants of a collaborative work often do not know other participants
in person, work in different time zones, do not speak the same language, and
do not share the same culture. These, among other factors, hinder the
information sharing (Chang and Ehrlich 2007), increase the possibility of
conflicts (Sarma et al. 2008), and inhibit informal interaction among team
members (Calefato et al. 2009).

2.1. Awareness for communication, coordination, and cooperation (3C Model)

The 3C collaboration model has often been used in the literature to classify
collaborative tools or to support CSCW analysis (Muhammad et al. 2005; Neale
et al. 2004; Kaariainen and Valimaki 2011; Wirth and Albayrak 2011; Fuks et al.
2008). Organizing collaborative tools according to this model facilitates the
analysis of issues related to each dimension separately while composing a
complete solution (Fuks et al. 2007). Moreover, as they are interrelated concepts,
dealing with them separately may reveal factors that otherwise would be
forgotten. During communication, people negotiate and make decisions,
generating commitments. Coordination organizes and manages tasks and people.
Cooperation is the execution of tasks by group members by means of a joint
operation in a shared space manipulating shared artifacts. The analysis of
collaboration based on these dimensions was originally proposed by Ellis et al.
(1991), with some terminological differences, and later extended by Fuks et al.
(2007). Figure 1 presents some applications positioned in the triangle formed by
the three dimensions.
We used the 3C model to categorize the papers that improve awareness support
in DSD according to the dimension they mainly support. We adopted the
following criteria to classify them:
Communication: when the paper reports improvements to the way messages
and information are exchanged among people, reducing gaps, ambiguity, or
the effort needed to understand, establish, or continue a conversation (for
example, presenting the context in which the communication takes place is a
communication awareness feature);
Coordination: when the paper reports improvements to the support offered for
people managing themselves or being aware of the activities flow
Awareness Support in Distributed Software Development 117

Figure 1. Applications spread in the 3 C triangle based on (Borghoff and Schlichter 2000;
Wirth and Albayrak 2011).

(availability status and simultaneous editing indication as well as the level of

activity of each participant are examples of coordination awareness
information);
Cooperation: when the paper reports improvements to the shared space or to
the way users interact with shared artifacts synchronous or asynchronously
(source code annotation, screen sharing, and code coloring are example of
cooperation awareness features). In this context, shared space is a virtual
workspace in which people are able to collaborate, sharing artifacts and
information related to their collaborative work.

2.2. Gutwin et al. awareness framework

Gutwin et al. (1996) proposed a framework to describe the elements and
mechanisms of awareness on groupware systems. They present four types of
awareness (workspace, informal, group-structural, and social awareness), as
shown in Fig. 2. The four types of awareness proposed are defined as follows:
& Workspace Awareness: the collection of up-to-the-minute knowledge that a
person holds about the state of another’s interaction with the workspace. It
helps people move between individual and shared activities, provides a
context in which it is possible to interpret other’s utterances, allows
anticipation of others’ actions, and reduces the effort needed to coordinate
tasks and resources.
& Informal Awareness: the general sense of whom is around and what they
are up to (the kinds of things that people know when they work together at
the same office). Informal awareness is the glue that facilitates casual
interaction.
118 Igor Steinmacher et al.

Informal Group-Structural

Social Workspace

Figure 2. Types of awareness according to (Gutwin et al. 1996).

& Group-Structural Awareness: involves knowledge about such things as

people’s roles and responsibilities, their positions on an issue, their status,
and group processes.
& Social Awareness: the information that a person maintains about others in a
social or conversational context, e.g. whether another person is paying
attention, their emotional state, or their level of interest. Social awareness is
maintained by means of conversational cues such as back-channel feedback,
and by non-verbal cues like eye contact, facial expression, and body language.

The conceptual framework of awareness was built to present a set of basic

ideas that are critical for the design of awareness support. It is composed of a set
of key elements that collaborators keep track of during collaboration in a shared
space. The elements are seen in many kinds of workspace collaboration, and can
be related to questions that people ask themselves during group work. This set of
elements and the related questions are presented in Table 1.

Table 1. Elements of Gutwin et al. Awareness Framework (Gutwin et al. 1996).

Element Questions
Identity Who is participating in the activity?
Location Where are they?
Activity Level How active are they in the workspace?
How fast are they working?
Actions What are they doing?
What are their current activities and tasks?
Intentions What are they going to do?
Where are they going to be?
Changes What changes are they making?
Where are the changes being made?
Objects What objects are they using?
Extents What can they see?
Abilities What can they do?
Sphere of Influence Where can they have effects?
Expectations What do they need me to do next?
Awareness Support in Distributed Software Development 119

The set of elements and questions presented by Gutwin et al. (1996) covers a great
part of awareness elements present on collaborative software development, and plays
a central role on any collaborative work. We decided to use the framework as a way
to classify the elements of awareness presented by the current literature in DSD
because of its comprehensive view of workspace awareness and the fact that it is
widely used in the general awareness literature (Omoronyia et al. 2010).

3. Systematic review and mapping

A systematic review is a way of identifying, evaluating, and interpreting the
available research related to a research question, topic area, or phenomenon. The
main purpose for conducting a systematic review is to gather evidences to base
conclusions in order to support or contradict claims made by researchers, identify
gaps in existing research, provide motivation for new research, and supply a
context for the new research (Williams and Carver 2010). On the other hand,
Systematic Mapping Studies (also known as Scoping Studies) are designed to
provide an overview of a research area, and to provide an indication about the
quantity and type of research available within it . Hence, the mapping-related
questions are concerned with the structure of the area and the review-related
questions with the evidence (Petersen 2011).
Kitchenham (2004) summarizes the stages of a systematic review into three
main activities: (i) Planning the Review, (ii) Conducting the Review, and (iii)
Reporting the Review. We organized our systematic review and mapping
according to this approach.

3.1. Review and mapping planning

The planning activity includes the identification of the objectives and the
definition of a protocol. The protocol specifies the method to be used to undertake
the systematic review and mapping in a way to reduce the researcher bias
(Kitchenham 2004). Systematic reviews are thus auditable and replicable, in the
sense that other professionals may reproduce the same protocol and judge the
adequacy of the chosen standards. This section summarizes our protocol.

3.1.1. Research questions

Formulating the research questions is the most important activity during the protocol
definition (Kitchenham 2004), as they guide the systematic mapping and review. The
research questions are divided into mapping questions and review questions. To
perform our systematic mapping, we defined the following questions:
MQ1: How are the publications on DSD distributed across the years?
& We expect that the answer to this question points out the growth or
shortening of the research area.
120 Igor Steinmacher et al.

MQ2: Who are the most active authors in the area?

& With this question we expect to have an indication of the main
researchers in the area, offering a reference for related publications in
future researches.

MQ3: Which publication forums are the main targets for DSD research
production?
& By answering this question we expect to point to where papers can be
found, as well as identify good targets for publication of future studies.

The review questions (RQ) drive the systematic review research (Kitchenham
and Charters 2007). In our systematic review, the questions were:
RQ1: What awareness studies aimed to improve the DSD scenario?
& The answer to this question includes all papers presenting tools, surveys,
case studies, experiments, or theoretical studies that contribute to the way
awareness is supported in a Distributed Software Development scenario.

RQ2: Which elements of the 3C model and of the Gutwin et al. Awareness
framework do the DSD studies support?
& The answer to this question involves the identification of which kind of
contribution is offered by the papers, classifying them according to the
3C collaboration model and to the Gutwin et al. Awareness Framework.

3.1.2. Search strategy

The research questions drive the definition of a query string to be executed
in scientific repositories. To compose this query, key terms (along with their
synonymous) are defined. The query string presents a set of logical
expressions that combine keywords and their synonymous, arranged in a
way that increases the number of relevant papers obtained from search
engines (Mian et al. 2005).
The keywords used in our review are presented in Table 2 and were defined
based on terms related to DSD and to awareness. The words of category C1 were
defined based on previous systematic reviews conducted on the DSD domain
((Prikladnicki and Audy 2010; Jimenez et al. 2009). Category C1 has more
keywords and reflects the fact that the DSD area is maturing, and there are many
variations of the same term. The keywords related to the classification of papers
were not included in the query string because there are papers related to
awareness that might not explicitly present any of the related terms, but can be
classified according to them. Category C2 has just the word “Awareness,”
because it is the key term in this research and it is largely used on CSCW and
Software Engineering literature.
Awareness Support in Distributed Software Development 121
Table 2. Keywords defined based on the research questions.

Reference Category Keywords

C1 Distributed Software Distributed software development, Global
Development software development, Collaborative software
development, Global software engineering,
Globally distributed work, Collaborative
software engineering, Distributed
development, Distributed teams, Global
software teams, Globally distributed
development, Geographically distributed
software development, Offshore software
development, Dispersed teams, Virtual teams

C2 Awareness “Awareness”

The query string was defined as a combination of C1 and C2 presented in Table 2

using the logical connectors “AND” and “OR.” The query string was used to retrieve
the candidate papers in the following search sources, selected based on previous
studies (Dybå and Dingsøyr 2008; Prikladnicki and Audy 2010):
& Science@Direct (http://www.sciencedirect.com);
& El Compendex (http://www.engineeringvillage.com);
& IEEE Digital Library (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org);
& ACM Digital Library (http://portal.acm.org);
& Springer Link (http://springerlink.com);
& ISI Web of Science (www.isiknowledge.com);
& Scopus (http://www.scopus.com).

3.1.3. Inclusion and exclusion criteria

All the papers obtained by running the query string on each selected source were
analyzed to check their relevance to this research. The process used to include or
exclude a paper was based on (Kitchenham and Charters 2007; Prikladnicki and
Audy 2010) and comprised the following steps:
1. The papers titles were read, and those papers that were considered clearly
irrelevant to the research questions, were excluded.
2. The remaining papers were gathered and repetitions were excluded. For the
exclusion, sources that actually publish the papers were prioritized over those
that just index articles from other publishers.
3. The included papers were then analyzed based on their abstracts and
keywords, considering the research questions.
4. Papers included in the previous step were further analyzed based on the
reading of introduction, conclusion, and specific parts related to the
contributions.
122 Igor Steinmacher et al.

5. All papers selected so far were fully read by the researchers and documented
on a proper form. Those papers which, despite addressing awareness issues,
did not focus on DSD domain were dismissed. Papers included after this step
were checked using quality criteria (presented in Section 3.1.4) and the
resulting papers were considered our primary studies.

To reduce bias, the first three steps were performed by two researchers
independently, and the paper passed to the next step if at least one of them
decided so. In the other steps, the paper was included after some discussion and
consensus. All the steps were reviewed by a third—more experienced—
researcher, responsible for checking the information generated. It is worth
noticing that only papers written in English were considered.

3.1.4. Quality assessment

According to (Kitchenham and Charters 2007), quality assessment is considered
critical to assess the primary studies to guide the interpretation of findings and
determine the strength of inferences, among other reasons. Each of the 91 papers
that remained after step 4 was assessed by one researcher and discussed with the
other, according to a set of criteria. This set, presented in Table 3, was defined
based on (Dybå and Dingsøyr 2008) and (Kitchenham et al. 2010). Each of the
10 criteria was graded on a dichotomous scale (Yes, No). Only criterion QA1 was
used for excluding a paper. The other criteria were used to assist individual data
analysis. Taken together, these 10 criteria provided a measure of the extent to
which we could be confident that a particular study’s findings could make a
valuable contribution to the review.

3.1.5. Data collection and analysis

All selected papers were categorized based on the classification used in (Jimenez
et al. 2009): (i) case studies; (ii) theoretical studies (also including conceptual/

Table 3. Quality assurance criteria used in this review.

No. Question
QA1 Does the study answer primarily or secondarily the research questions?
QA2 Are the objectives and research aims clearly defined?
QA3 Is there an adequate description of the context in which the research was carried out?
QA4 Was there a control group/comparison with other studies?
QA5 Have the authors explained how the study sample (participants or cases) was identified
and selected, and what was the justification for such selection?
QA6 Is it clear how the data were collected (e.g. through interviews, forms, observation, tools, etc.)?
QA7 Do the authors explain how the analysis/interpretation of the collected data was done?
QA8 Does the study clearly report the results?
QA9 Are the results consistent with the objectives presented?
QA10 Are limitations and validity of the study discussed explicitly?
Awareness Support in Distributed Software Development 123

theoretical frameworks); (iii) experiments; (iv) literature reviews; and (v) tools
(also including frameworks and architectures).
The categorization according to the 3C collaboration model was based on the
evaluation of the dimensions (communication, coordination, or cooperation)
supported by the paper under analysis. Each dimension was graded from 0 to 3,
according to the level of support the paper presented:
3: Mainly supports (main focus of awareness study is on that dimension);
2: Also supports (the dimension is not the main focus, but it is also supported);
1: Indirectly supports (it has no focus, but brings indirect improvement);
0: Does not support (when no support or improvement is presented).

For the categorization based on the Gutwin et al. Awareness Framework , we

used the set of elements and related questions presented in Table 1. We have also
considered the possibility of past events (asynchronous interactions) appearing as
workspace awareness elements, as the framework “does not mention elements for
maintaining awareness of asynchronous changes, required for people to catch up
with events that have already taken place in the workspace” (Tam and Greenberg
2004). Action and artifact history concern the details of events that have already
occurred, and event history concerns the timing of when events happened
(Gutwin and Greenberg 2002). Table 4 presents the full list of elements and
questions considered in our analysis. The researchers could choose as many
elements as they wanted for each paper analyzed.

3.2. Conducting the review

After executing the whole process defined in Section 3.1.3, 91 primary studies
were selected. More details about the process, the papers included, and their
classification can be found at http://www.igor.pro.br/JCSCW/awarenessDSD.

3.2.1. Inclusion and exclusion process results

As observed in Fig. 3, confirming the observations made by Prikladnicki and
Audy (2010), the lack of a standard terminology in DSD resulted in a large
number of papers to start with (total of 1967 papers found), but only a few were
selected. A high number of papers of unrelated areas (like computer networks,
ubiquitous computing, e-analysis, learning, and psychology) also contributed to
the large number of papers discarded at the beginning. Table 5 presents the
number of papers per phase, distributed according to the source of the paper.
For the first step, the titles were analyzed by two researchers independently of
each other. From the 1967 papers returned by the query, 728 (37.0 %) were
selected. All selected papers were checked to dismiss duplications. Then, 167
papers were excluded (22.9 %) and 561 were kept.
The next step involved abstract reading. All abstracts were read by two researchers
independently. After the analysis, 277 papers were selected. We also computed the
124 Igor Steinmacher et al.
Table 4. Elements and questions considered for papers classification (based on (Gutwin et al. 1996)).

Awareness Dimension Element Questions

Workspace Identity Who is/was participating in the activity?
Workspace Location Where are/were they?
Workspace Activity Level How active are/were they in the workspace?
How fast are/were they working?
Workspace Actions What are/were they doing?
What are/were their current activities and tasks?
Workspace Intentions What are they going to do?
Where are they going to be?
Workspace Changes What changes are they making (did they make)?
Where are the changes being made?
Workspace Objects What objects are/were they using?
Workspace Extents What can they see?
Workspace Abilities What can they do?
Workspace Sphere of Influence Where can they have effects?
Workspace Expectations What do they need me to do next?
Informal Presence Who is around?
What are they up to?
Informal Opinion What is their opinion?
Social Interest Level How interested are they?
Social Emotional Feelings How are they feeling?
Social Availability Are they available?
Group Structural Roles and What are their roles/positions?
Responsibilities

Kappa coefficient to check the degree of agreement among researchers. The Kappa
for step 3 assessments was 0.723, which is characterized as “substantial agreement”
according to the classification by Landis and Koch (1977).
On step 4, the researchers read the introductions and conclusions and specific
parts related to the contributions of the paper. The papers that did not present any
clear contribution to awareness on DSD were dismissed. As a result, 134 papers
were included by at least one researcher. The agreement was very good, with the
Kappa coefficient of 0.816 (classified as “almost perfect” (Landis and Koch
1977)). These 134 papers were selected as relevant papers and were submitted to
an in-depth analysis.
In the deeper analysis, performed by reading the full papers, 39 papers were
considered not relevant to the review. The main reason for dismissing papers at
this step was that they did not present contributions to the DSD area.

3.2.2. Quality assessment

All 91 remaining papers were submitted to the quality assessment presented in
Section 3.1.4. Table 6 presents the percentage of papers that received ‘yes’ as the
answer for each criterion. The results enable us to be confident in the inclusion of
Awareness Support in Distributed Software Development 125

Figure 3. Paper selection process.

Table 5. Distribution of papers selection according to their source.

Source/ Query date Query Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5

result
Title/ Repetitions Abstract Introduction/ Full
keywords Analysis Conclusion Text
Analysis Analysis Reading

ACM 21 October 2010 470 148 130 73 52 33

IEEE 21 October 2010 52 34 32 23 11 10
Scopus 22 October 2010 641 352 256 123 48 32
Science Direct 26 October 2010 292 47 46 17 6 3
El Compendex 27 October 2010 122 37 4 3 0 0
Springer 27 October 2010 352 83 83 32 15 11
ISI 29 October 2010 38 27 10 6 2 2
TOTAL 1967 728 561 277 134 91
126 Igor Steinmacher et al.
Table 6. Quality Assessment overall results.

Question % of papers
that received
‘yes’

1. Does the study answer primarily or secondarily the research questions? 100.00 %
2. Are the objectives and research aims clearly defined? 98.90 %
3. Is there an adequate description of the context in which the research was carried out? 80.20 %
4. Was there a control group/comparison with other studies? 76.92 %
5. Has the researcher explained how the study sample (participants or cases) was 53.85 %
identified and selected, and what was the justification for such selection?
6. Is it clear how the data was collected (e.g. through interviews, forms, 59.34 %
observation, tools, etc.)?
7. Do the authors explain how the analysis/interpretation of the collected data was done? 54.95 %
8. Does the study clearly report the results? 79.12 %
9. Are the results consistent with the objectives presented? 95.60 %
10. Are limitations and validity of the study discussed explicitly? 81.32 %

the primary studies in this review. Most papers define their objectives clearly and
present results in a consistent way. It is noteworthy the high number of papers
that presented their limitations and threats to validity, enabling other researchers
to help filling the gaps left opened. However, we found out that many of the
publications lack details about the research methods used, not explaining how
they have chosen the samples, how the data were collected, or how the data were
analyzed. The high number of papers presenting new tools can be one
explanation for this lack of research methods details.

4. Systematic mapping report

A systematic mapping aims to provide an overview of a research area and to
identify the quantity and type of research available within it. In this section, we
present the answers to our mapping questions (MQ).
To answer MQ1—How are the publications of the area distributed across the
years?—Figure 4 is presented. The first conclusion we can draw from the figure is
that awareness in DSD is an area that was not widely studied until 2005, and recently
gained attention. We can observe that 71 out of 91 papers were published from 2006
to 2010. Among them, 21 appeared in 2010. It is important to highlight that the
search was performed in late 2010, so it is possible that more papers could have been
published in 2010 and early 2011, and had not been yet indexed.
Regarding MQ2 (who are the most active researchers in the area), Table 7
depicts the authors that most appeared on the selected primary studies. If we
check the number of different papers published by the top five authors, we come
to a number of 24 (26.4 % of the papers). Some of them work together. Anita
Sarma, for example, worked with David Redmiles, André van der Hoek, and
James Herbsleb.
Awareness Support in Distributed Software Development 127
25
21
Number of Papers

20

14
15 13 13
10
10
5
4 4
5 3 3
1
0
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 20010
Year

Figure 4. Number of relevant papers per year (queries from October 2010).

Question MQ3 is related to the main forums of publication for awareness

studies in DSD. To answer this question, we first analyzed the type of
publication: Journal versus Conference. The result shows that 79 papers
(86.8 %) were published in conference proceedings, while just 12 (13.2 %)
appeared in journals. An interesting fact is that each of the 12 journal papers
appeared in a different vehicle.
The 79 papers published in conference proceedings appeared in 43 different
forums. In Fig. 5 we show the 13 conferences that present more than one paper
published. We must highlight ICSE (International Conference on Software
Engineering), whose main track accommodated 13 papers (14.3 % of all primary
studies / 16.5 % of conference papers). If we consider ICSE workshops (MSR,
CHASE, SDG, and Web2SE) together, we come to a total of 21 papers.
Therefore, ICSE is definitely the main forum regarding awareness studies on
DSD domain. The conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE)
published six of the primary studies (6.6 %). Regarding CSCW related forums,
five primary studies were published on CSCW (ACM Conference on Computer

Table 7. Most active researchers and number of primary studies.

Author # of papers

André van der Hoek 11

Anita Sarma 9
James D. Herbsleb 6
Lile Hattori 5
David Redmiles 4
Cleidson R. B. de Souza; Clinton Jeffery; Daniela Damian; Hani Bani-Salameh; 3
Inah Omoronyia; John Ferguson; Kurt Schneider; Marc Roper; Marcelo Cataldo;
Murray Wood; Prasun Dewan; Ziad Al-Sharif
128 Igor Steinmacher et al.
14 13

12
Number of papers

10

8
6
6 5
4
4 3 3 3
2 2 2 2 2 2
2

Conference

Figure 5. Publications per forum. Keys: ICSE = International Conference on Software

Engineering; ICGSE = International Conference on Global Software Engineering; CSCW =
ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work; CHASE = Workshop on
Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering; GROUP = International Conference
on Supporting Group Work; CHI = Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems;
CRIWG = Conference on Collaboration and Technology; ASE = International Conference on
Automated Software Engineering; IEEE RE = International IEEE Requirements Engineering
Conference; MSR = Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories; VISSOFT = IEEE
International Workshop on Visualizing Software for Understanding and Analysis; ICSM =
International Conference on Software Maintenance; OTM = On The Move Conferences; ETX =
Eclipse Technology Exchange workshop; OOPSLA = Object-Oriented Programming, Systems,
Languages & Applications.

Supported Cooperative Work), three were published on CRIWG, and other three
on the GROUP conference.

5. Systematic review report

In this section, we present an overall analysis of the primary studies regarding the
type of studies found (Section 3.1.5) and a discussion of the works involving the
improvements, opportunities, and research gaps identified in this review. The
discussion is based on the 3 C collaboration model (Section 5.2) and on Gutwin
et al. Awareness Framework analysis (Section 5.3). Hereafter, we use the notation
[PSXX] to cite the primary studies analyzed, where XX is a unique identification
of the primary study (see Appendix A for the list of primary studies and their
source, type, and reference).

5.1. Studies type

Figure 6 presents the type of studies encountered (according to the classification
presented in Section 3.1.5). All papers were classified in, at least, one category.
Awareness Support in Distributed Software Development 129

Figure 6. Venn diagram for types of primary studies found.

The large number of tools-related papers may be noted. Among the 91 primary
studies, 68 (74.7 %) presented a new tool, most of them (47) without any
experimental analysis. Thus, we can observe that the focus of the research so far
was to present new tools to support DSD activities. It is worth pointing out that
some of these papers were related to the same tool, or presented different features
of the same tool. For example, the tool Palantìr appears in seven papers [PS74]
[PS76] [PS82] [PS81] [PS80] [PS78] [PS79], Syde appears in five papers [PS52]
[PS53] [PS54] [PS51] [PS55], and COLLECE [PS29] [PS30] and SCI [PS04]
[PS05] appear in two different papers. The other 23 papers identified in this
review were categorized as case studies, theoretical studies, and/or experiments.
Just one of them was classified only as experiment [PS70]; it reports a controlled
experiment to check the potential benefits of information visualization in
supporting newcomers.
Of the four theoretical studies, three present conceptual frameworks for
awareness support [PS31] [PS13] [PS90]; and one introduces the concept of
interface translucence as a mechanism for enabling scalable collaboration in
software ecosystems [PS14]. Two papers of the review present case studies
conducted within the industry [PS21] [PS20]. One of them focuses on
investigating whether current awareness, general awareness, and availability are
correlated with communication patterns in Requirements Centered Social
Networks [PS21]. The other case study goal was to check the consequences of
awareness gaps, verifying possible relationships among broken builds and these
gaps [PS20]. In addition to the papers presented in Fig. 6, one paper [PS88] was
classified as a Survey, presenting and classifying a set of visualization tools which
support awareness of human activities in distributed software development.

5.2. Papers classification according to the 3C model

Figure 7 shows the classification of the primary studies according to the 3C
collaboration model. This Venn diagram presents the number of awareness
130 Igor Steinmacher et al.

Figure 7. Venn diagram for the 3C-model classification.

studies that bring support (at any level) for each 3C-dimension. Therefore, the
first conclusion is that communication is scarcely studied, appearing in just 17
papers (18.7 %), with just four focusing only on communication. We can also
observe that a great focus is given to coordination and cooperation, as 87 out of
91 papers (95.6 %) present some support to one of these dimensions; and 45
papers (49.5 %) present support to coordination and cooperation concurrently.
Nine other papers presented some level of support in all dimensions.
Figure 8 presents the distribution of papers according to the level of awareness
support provided to each of the 3C model dimensions. It is clear that coordination
is by far the main focus of awareness studies on DSD domain due to the number
of papers that mainly support it (evaluated with 3 in the scale presented in
Section 2.1): a total of 58 papers out of 91 (63.7 %). When we verified papers
that support coordination and that were evaluated with 2 or 3, this number grows
to 74 (81.3 %). On the other hand, communication is mainly supported by only
eight papers (8.8 %). In the following subsections, we briefly present the 3C
awareness elements encountered in this literature review.

5.2.1. Communication
According to Jimenez et al. (2009), the software life cycle requires a great deal of
communication using different tools and formats to avoid misunderstandings and
delays. Awareness initiatives are needed to avoid ambiguity and misunderstandings,
as cultural differences imply on different vocabulary that may lead to mistakes.
As discussed in the previous subsection, awareness supporting communication
is poorly explored within the DSD domain. Although many researchers cite
communication issues as motivation, only eight awareness initiatives mainly
Awareness Support in Distributed Software Development 131
90

80
6

70
16
60
Number of Papers

Weight 1
50 19
Weight 2

40 Weight 3

18
30 58

20
7
24
10 2
8
0
Coordination Cooperation Communication

Figure 8. Number of papers classified according to the dimensions of the 3C model.

support communication. Most of these papers are focused on offering some kind
of context for the conversation. A tickertape tool was introduced by Fitzpatrick
[PS39] to present CVS commit messages to members of a project, enabling them
to start a private or a group chat within the context of the CVS message.
Communico [PS28] is a tool that presents awareness mechanisms that enable
participants to check ongoing and past discussions, to know who is talking, and
the their level of knowledge. Jazz [PS17] includes a chat tool that enables
developers to include links to transcripts of older chats and team event
notifications. A Jazz extension, called COFFEE [PS09], provides a discussion
tool embedded within eclipse, enabling developers to conduct threaded and
categorized discussions within the development environment. EGRET [PS86]
also provides contextualized chat and email tools that enable the automatic or
manual insertion of navigable links to relevant artifacts into messages.
Another concern of the studies is how to improve informal communication.
The social network application FriendFeed1 was integrated to Jazz [PS11] to
bring personal interests to workspace and to support informal and social
communication by means of microblogs within their development environment.
To enable informal, verbal, or ad-hoc communication during project analysis,
Stapel et al. [PS87] proposed a specific notation to model and depict information
flows, stimulating point-to-point communication.
Ehrlich and Chang [PS32] report a case study conducted within the industry that
analyzes the effects of awareness in communication in a DSD environment. The
authors found out that frequency of communication was associated with awareness
of the person’s current work and familiarity to the other person. Some papers [PS30]
132 Igor Steinmacher et al.

[PS88] [PS06] [PS71] [PS83] present limited means to support communication in

DSD environments (e.g. chats, forums) without any specific contribution to provide
an easier or more effective communication in a DSD scenario.
To conclude, we can argue that some topics about communication are scarcely
studied, but present challenges and research opportunities. For example, privacy
issues regarding access to sensitive user data during communication is a topic that
is starting to be studied on DSD domain (Godefroid et al. 2000; Patil et al. 2009)
and can be explored on awareness studies. Ways to support cultural, political, and
language differences are frequently cited as issues in DSD studies, but papers
addressing them were not found. Semantics extraction and communication
formalization could be used to address these issues, for example.

5.2.2. Coordination
To coordinate themselves, team members need to be aware of their tasks and
interdependencies (Damian et al. 2007a). 80 out of 91 (87.9 %) papers present
some level of support for coordination and 58 (63.7 %) mainly support it.
To provide awareness for coordination, some papers focused on presenting
information regarding the tasks of a project. A list of tasks is presented in
TeamSpace [PS43], enabling team members to be aware of related tasks and to track
them. ProjectWatcher [PS48] observes and records fine-grained information about
user modifications and provides visualizations of who works on the project, what
artifacts they have been working on, and where in the project they have been working.
Another approach used to provide awareness to support coordination is gathering
information on source code version management repository. CAISE [PS18] is a
tool based on commits to notify developers regarding dependent code, user
dependencies, and impacts of code changes. Celine [PS34] offers information about
artifact conflicts in chaotic, star, and extended star models, by means of an awareness
mechanism that supports conflict management in Software Configuration Manage-
ment (SCM) systems. Syde [PS52] [PS53] [PS54] [PS51] [PS55] is a collaborative
tool that brings awareness of team members actions by propagating changes as they
happen, and by warning about potential conflicting changes. Many other papers
revealed that code repositories are a rich source of information for awareness
generation [PS82] [PS17] [PS22] [PS19] [PS68].
Also using information from source code version management repository, but
applying social network analysis (SNA) techniques, de Souza et al. [PS25]
introduce Ariadne, a tool that enables visual analysis of sociotechnical
dependencies, thus helping to find coordination problems. TraVis [PS24]
provides a real-time visualization of the project traceability network of artifacts
and users, containing valuable information about dependencies between software
developers and about what other people work on. Other papers also present
sociotechnical network analysis to improve awareness, such as [PS77], [PS66],
[PS33] and [PS01].
Awareness Support in Distributed Software Development 133

Some papers propose the usage of visualization techniques to support

coordination. Ye et al. [PS91] present SecondWATCH, a tool that enables
visualization of local workspaces, version control repository, and bug tracking
system in real-time as a common view shared by the whole team using a 3D city
metaphor. Augur [PS41] is a visualization tool that creates visual representations of
both software artifacts and software development activities, besides enabling
developers to explore the relationship between such activities and artifacts.
SoftChange [PS42] provides an interactive application that enables the exploration
of the project history as a collection of graphs: file authorship (sociotechnical),
coupling (co-changes), change overview, authorship overview, and file evolution
graphs. StarGate [PS66] uses information visualization techniques to assist the user
in understanding the complex interactions between developers and software
repositories, helping team members to understand the evolution of the software
project over time. Palantír [PS74] provides a three-dimensional activity viewer to
explore workspace activities and their evolution on a project-wide basis.
The usage of version management repository information and SNA to search for
experts (or identify artifact ownership [PS53]) is another mechanism largely studied
to provide awareness to support coordination. Expertise Browser [PS64] and
SmallBlue [PS33] are tools to assist users in identifying experts for a specific artifact
or task, making them aware of how experienced the candidates are. Minto and
Murphy [PS63] present Emergent Expertise Locator, which uses Instant Messenger
clients embedded in developers IDE to make them aware of experts. Minto and
Murphy use a method proposed by Cataldo et al. [PS15] to measure task
dependencies among people, by checking the “congruence” between these task
dependencies and the coordination activities performed by individuals. Begel et al.
[PS07] present Hoozizat, a tool developed to find people who own and are responsible
for a feature, API, product, or service, built as a web search portal over Codebook.
One of the features proposed by Omoronyia [PS67] [PS68] is the possibility of
ranking developers according to their relevance to a task or artifact, as a result of a
real-time analysis of interactions generated from every developers’ workstation.
Tracing artifacts and relationships among them is also used to support
coordination on DSD projects. Helming et al. [PS57] present UNICASE, a tool
that implements a unified model that explicitly combines system specification and
project management models into one fully traceable model, used to notify interested
parties. Sysiphus [PS10] enables users to trace artifacts and related users by
modeling the links among artifacts as directed graphs and allowing subscription for
changes notification. TraVis [PS24] provides a traceability of artifacts and users
using social network graphs. Share [PS02] aims to help developers keeping track of
their code, presenting a practice of loosely bound cooperation in which individuals
are able to pursue independent goals and assist each other.
Three papers present flexible ways to make members aware of quality metrics
results, helping developers and leaders/managers to coordinate their work.
EvolTrack presents software evolution and enables customizations to show specific
134 Igor Steinmacher et al.

metrics in user-defined color scales. Proença et al. [PS72] present a tool that shows
quality metrics (e.g. number of developers, number of recent bugs, code volatility),
and an overall quality measure represented by a colored border in UML class
diagrams. CoderChrome [PS50] is a code coloring plugin for Eclipse that provides
means to derive coloring or decorations on source code for information such as code
author, code age, cyclomatic complexity, and line length.
Cataldo and Herbsleb [PS13] propose a framework based on product features
to support coordination within distributed environments, providing information
about members’ activities and their relations with product features.
Most part of the papers that support coordination presented features based on
historical information extracted from source code repositories. However, key
information used to obtain awareness is based on items that change on a daily,
hourly, or minute-by-minute basis (Biehl et al. 2007). Therefore, there is still
room for research on awareness based on recent information [PS68]. The use of
Social Networks is another research topic appearing on DSD domain. A possible
fruitful area is the use of social network to maintain awareness on emerging and
unplanned interactions that can appear during the development cycle [PS20].

5.2.3. Cooperation
To cooperatively edit a shared artifact, developers need to be aware of current and
previous actions affecting that artifact to avoid loss of efforts. Some papers propose
awareness elements embedded in the shared artifacts to provide notifications. In this
sense, two papers [PS58] [PS60] use code annotation to present changes being
concurrently made by other developers in a shared artifact. Dekel and Herbsleb
[PS26] also use code annotation to provide awareness on a tool called eMoose,
which enables developers to write informal comments in the code, stores them in a
central database, and spreads them to other developers using the annotated module.
Warning conflicts on shared artifacts is a common way to provide awareness to
support cooperation. Lighthouse [PS19] is a tool that captures code change events
directly on developers’ workspace to avoid conflicts by keeping a shared and up-to-
date UML design representation of the actual code, displaying information about
who is updating the code and which actions are being done. CASI [PS85] is a
Lighthouse plugin that aims to avoid indirect conflicts by dynamically showing the
source code entities that are being modified by any developer along with their
Spheres of Influence. Guimarães and Rito-Silva [PS46] propose the concept of real-
time integration and implement it on WeCode (Eclipse plugin) by automating the
detection of actual conflicts while programming, enabling developers to share fine-
grained changes before they check in. Estublier and Garcia [PS34] present a study
based on cooperative policies to control concurrent engineering in order to avoid
conflicts considering different concurrent models. Other papers also present elements
to avoid conflicts during cooperative handling of artifacts [PS55] [PS60] [PS72].
Regarding support for synchronous artifact handling, CE4WEB [PS71] is a
cooperative CASE tool that supports the cooperative edition of UML diagram,
Awareness Support in Distributed Software Development 135

offering a shared blackboard and telepointers. OdisseyShare SDE [PS62] provides a

solution based on a telepointer and a radar view as awareness elements to support
synchronous handling of UML diagrams. There are some other papers focused on
the coding phase, in particular supporting the XP pair programming practice for
distributed members, enabling developers to cooperate over a shared piece of code
[PS38] [PS49] [PS84] [PS75] [PS56]. Usually, these tools also provide means for the
developers to communicate and coordinate their actions.
Despite the number of papers supporting cooperation, this area requires further
development. An example is that none of the papers presents ways to make
developers aware of pieces of code to complete a given function based on similar
codes extracted from other developers’ code. So far, coding is the most supported
phase. The other development activities may be further explored, for example,
offering support to clients and analysts cooperate during requirement specification
or acceptance tests writing.

5.2.4. Summary of the classification according to the 3C Model

In this subsection, we summarize the classification of awareness features
according to the 3C collaboration model. This classification was made to (i)
organize the high number of papers found on this review, and (ii) to provide a
quick reference for DSD environment developers and researchers regarding
which awareness features have already been investigated.
Table 8 presents the references for the papers classified according to the 3C
model dimensions they support. The table does not include frameworks or
architectures. It is possible to notice that some elements provide support to more
than one C, while others seem to be more specific. The level of support and the
axis supported depends on the way the element is used on each study.

5.3. Papers classification according to the Gutwin et al. Awareness Framework

In addition to the classification based on the 3C model, the primary studies were
also classified according to the Gutwin et al. Awareness Framework (Gutwin et
al. 1996), based on the questions and elements presented in Table 4
(Section 3.1.5). The data extracted are depicted in Fig. 9 and show the number
of papers related to each element. Six papers were not classified according to this
framework as they present experimental studies not mentioning any specific
element [PS13][PS20][PS21][PS31][PS70][PS88].
Figure 10 depicts the Venn diagram representing the distribution of awareness
elements on DSD domain according to their types. We can see that workspace
awareness is by far the most explored type of awareness, playing a central role on
DSD domain. All papers present at least one workspace awareness element. Fifty
four (59.3 %) papers present only workspace awareness elements. The other 31
papers present some other type of element.
136 Igor Steinmacher et al.
Table 8. Identified awareness features supporting each 3C dimension.

Communication Coordination Cooperation

Activity control [PS10] [PS39] [PS43]

(workflow, agenda,
worklist)
Artifact change [PS05] [PS10] [PS17] [PS05] [PS22] [PS34]
indication [PS19] [PS22] [PS41] [PS54] [PS55] [PS56]
[PS46] [PS54] [PS55] [PS60] [PS72] [PS85]
[PS56] [PS59] [PS68]
[PS72] [PS76] [PS81]
[PS85] [PS86] [PS91]
Code coloring [PS50] [PS02] [PS75]
Collaborative artifact [PS19] [PS30] [PS35]
synchronous handling [PS38] [PS43] [PS56]
[PS71] [PS72] [PS75]
[PS84] [PS85]
Conflict indication [PS03] [PS18] [PS19] [PS19] [PS34] [PS46]
[PS34] [PS46] [PS54] [PS55] [PS60] [PS61]
[PS55] [PS56] [PS60] [PS72] [PS85]
[PS61] [PS72] [PS76]
[PS81] [PS83] [PS85]
Context/subject-aware [PS09] [PS17] [PS28]
message exchange [PS30] [PS39] [PS43]
[PS86]
Developers activity [PS05] [PS45] [PS48] [PS02]
Historic based [PS07] [PS15] [PS33]
expert search/ [PS48] [PS55] [PS56]
recommendation [PS63] [PS64] [PS68]
[PS69] [PS72]
Informal/Social [PS11]
Communication
Metrics visualization [PS16] [PS50] [PS72]
Presence/status [PS05] [PS12] [PS17]
indication [PS28] [PS30] [PS35]
[PS38] [PS43] [PS46]
[PS49] [PS56] [PS62]
[PS63] [PS65] [PS75]
[PS83] [PS84] [PS86]
[PS89] [PS91]
Screen Sharing [PS17] [PS27] [PS49] [PS05] [PS17] [PS30]
[PS62] [PS71] [PS83] [PS38] [PS56] [PS62]
[PS84] [PS71] [PS75] [PS83]
[PS84]
Social/socio- [PS02] [PS07] [PS24] [PS25] [PS68]
technical [PS25] [PS40] [PS42]
network [PS66] [PS68] [PS77]
Software [PS16] [PS41] [PS42]
Visualization / [PS55] [PS66] [PS68]
Evolution [PS70] [PS74] [PS91]
Source code [PS26] [PS59] [PS60]
annotation
Tracing artifacts [PS02] [PS10] [PS24]
and relationships [PS57]
Awareness Support in Distributed Software Development 137

As it can be observed, seven (7.7 %) papers present elements of all types

[PS84] [PS75] [PS86] [PS04] [PS05] [PS17] [PS11]. Some other papers
presented overlap of three types of awareness elements: six present social,
informal, and workspace elements [PS28] [PS89] [PS43] [PS56] [PS63] [PS91];
and one presents Group-structural, informal, and workspace elements [PS65].
In the next subsections, we detail some elements found in our systematic
review.

5.3.1. Workspace awareness

All classified papers present some element of workspace awareness, most part of
them presenting only elements of this type.
Identity is the most present element, appearing in 83 papers. In a collaborative
environment, it is essential to know who is responsible for the action that generated
an event. In some papers, this information is presented on communication tools (e.g.
forums and chats), enabling users to be aware of who posted a message, or who is
discussing it [PS28] [PS86] [PS30] [PS09] [PS11]. Other papers provide information
related to the person who is using or has been using an artifact, enabling users to
know who are the other members collaborating with them, like in [PS02] [PS55]
[PS60] [PS85] [PS91] [PS39] [PS40] [PS50] [PS19] [PS76].
Change awareness elements appear on 63 papers (68.1 %). Some of these
papers present awareness related to past changes, enabling members to visualize
the history of artifacts [PS07] [PS08] [PS16] [PS41] [PS66] [PS48]. Others focus

Classification of Awareness Elements

90 83
80

70 3
63
Number of studies

60 54
47
50

40
27
30 23 22
20 15 14 12
1
8 7
10 4 3 2 0 0
0

Awareness Elemments

Figure 9. Classification of awareness elements found on the primary studies.

138 Igor Steinmacher et al.

Figure 10. Awareness elements found, according to the dimensions proposed by (Gutwin et
al. 1996).

on awareness of real time changes that occur on distributed workspaces,

visualized directly on the shared artifacts [PS59] [PS78] [PS76] [PS02] [PS75]
[PS71] [PS61] [PS85] [PS55].
Sphere of Influence information makes people aware of the effects an action
can cause. On the selected DSD papers, this element is implemented by showing
up the conflicts that a change on an artifact can cause or is causing to other
artifacts or team members [PS19] [PS68] [PS36] [PS37] [PS24].
Activity level elements appear on 22 papers (24.2 %). Some of these papers
present the activity level using software visualization approaches like, for
example, in Stargate [PS66] and SoftChange [PS42]. Other papers focus on
showing the activity of the developers within a given task or contributions to a
given artifact. For instance, [PS44] [PS45] present a timeline with the amount of
changes made by the developers and his/her communication activity.
Location elements were found in four papers, making team members aware of
where in the world [PS82] [PS73] and within a building [PS43] are other
members located. Ehrlich and Chang [PS32] study the effects of being aware of
team members’ location while searching for experts and communicating.
Eight papers presented intention elements, focusing on revealing what the
members’ next activities are [PS08] [PS29] [PS30] [PS43] [PS56] [PS65] [PS68]
[PS79]. Seven other papers offer some information regarding members’ abilities
[PS04] [PS05] [PS08] [PS33] [PS47] [PS63] [PS25].
We also found 54 papers concerned on providing some awareness on what
objects are/were being used and 47 on making people aware of the actions
performed on the workspace.

5.3.2. Informal awareness

Informal awareness refers to who is around and what they are up to. This
kind of information is typically related to presence awareness, since it is
Awareness Support in Distributed Software Development 139

associated with technologies, such as Instant Messengers, which enable

colleagues at distributed locations be aware of who is online, offline, active,
inactive, etc (Omoronyia et al. 2010). Moreover, informal awareness is
related to team members’ ability to express their opinion and be aware of
others’ opinions about different aspects of collaborative work.
Informal awareness appears in 25 papers. 23 of them provide information
related to presence indication within the workspace. The use of Buddy lists is
the most explored way to show this kind of information. When dealing with
shared sessions (like using screen sharing), some papers bring presence indication
by showing a list of users on the session, telepointers, colored text selection
[PS75] [PS30] [PS84] [PS83], and radar view [PS38] [PS62]. A presence
indication element based on physical cameras and panels is presented by Everitt
et al. [PS35], indicating the presence of an individual by a blue shadow in the
remote workspaces.
Only two papers in this category present team members’ opinion. In the
COFFEE tool [PS09], users can post comments, arguments, questions, and other
contributions during a discussion. By adding FriendFeed to the developer
workspace, Calefato et al. [PS11] enabled users to share their opinion via
messages posts to a social network application available for a private corporative
group.

5.3.3. Social awareness

The social dimension creates opportunities to publish personal information
helping to establish a shared context among remote developers, with little or no
chances to physically meet [PS11].
Some availability feature was found on 11 out of 12 papers that presented social
awareness. Availability differs from presence element because it offers specific
information about the possibility of being interrupted or not, or if it is an opportune
moment to discuss a specific subject, for example. ICI/SCI [PS06] [PS05], and
SecondWATCH [PS91] improve social awareness by providing collaborative virtual
worlds/environments as part of the developers workspace, enabling them to interact
even when dispersed. Some papers use the status of a member to indicate what he/she
is doing (participating of a conversation [PS28], or visualizing/editing an artifact
[PS75] [PS56]). Some others present the availability using cameras in real time
[PS89] [PS43]. When working in shared spaces, such as distributed pair
programming environments, availability is indicated by presenting the sessions in
which the members are participating [PS84].
Just two papers improve the social area by means of emotional feelings or
social/personal information. FriendFeed [PS11] enables team members to express
their feelings by posting microblog messages, offering personal context and
culture sharing. Status message feature of Jazz [PS17] can also be used to express
emotions, since team members can change and share their status according to
their feeling at the moment.
140 Igor Steinmacher et al.

We think that this dimension has a lot of possibilities and can grow in order
to help current workspaces to become closer to collocated teams space. Since
social awareness helps to develop an organizational culture and to consolidate
connections and trust-based relationships between distant collaborators, it
contributes to project success by improving team’s well-being and social
health (Robinson and Sharp 2005). Researches involving interests, day-to-day
opinions, and emotions of group members can improve the distributed
scenario developing team spirit and help building personal relationships
among distant members.

5.3.4. Group structural awareness

Group-structural awareness is related to the expertise of the collaborators based
on the roles and responsibilities they assume. This knowledge is important when
choosing whom to initiate an interaction with, for mentoring purposes on project
activities [PS68].
Most part of the 14 papers presenting roles and responsibilities
awareness elements focus on finding out experts on a given subject,
extracting information from historical data and contextual information. Minto
and Murphy [PS63], for example, propose an Eclipse plugin to show a
ranked list of experts about the piece of code a developer is currently
working. Carter and Dewan [PS12] propose an approach to create awareness
information automatically based on developers’ interactions with the IDE,
indicating who is having difficulties. On their work, Hattori et al. [PS55]
present an approach based on IDE history logs to measure code ownership.
In this sense, other papers also present ways to find experts or owners of
specific artifacts (or parts of them) [PS33] [PS68] [PS72] [PS64].
Other papers aim to make teams aware of roles assigned to teams or
developers within an activity or project. On EGRET [PS86], a user is able to
list all stakeholders along with their status and roles in different modules. In
World View [PS82], it is possible to display maps presenting team’s location,
time zones and responsibilities, enabling one to check the dynamics of the
whole project.
Papers regarding group-structural awareness are expected to address devel-
opers’ awareness regarding the full distributed process, the roles involved in each
activity, and who is playing the roles on the project. Although there are a great
number of papers focusing on expertise and ownership search, the area can be
extended to support other development phases or to find experts on previous
development phases. For example, an architect may need to be aware of experts
on the domain or infrastructure of a solution he/she needs to design; a developer
may need to find the analysts able to help explaining the feature affected by the
code he/she is changing, etc.
Awareness Support in Distributed Software Development 141

5.3.5. Summary of the classification according to the Gutwin et al. Awareness

Framework
In this subsection, we summarize the classification of the awareness features found in
the papers according to the Gutwin et al. Awareness Framework. Table 9 presents the
references for the primary studies classified according to the framework. The table
does not include Interest Level and Expectations elements, because they were not
found in the papers. Additionally, the table includes just 85 papers, because six
primary studies were not classified according to this framework as they present
experimental studies not mentioning any specific element.

6. Threats to validity
Systematic review is a powerful method to search for primary studies within a
given domain (Kitchenham 2004). As any other method, it also presents some
threats to validity and limitations.
This review may have missed some papers that address the use of awareness to
support DSD, since we did not perform our search into every possible source and some
relevant papers may not contain the chosen terms. To reduce bias, we defined the
sources and the keywords based on other studies (Jimenez et al. 2009; Prikladnicki and
Audy 2010; Dybå and Dingsøyr 2008; Williams and Carver 2010; Petersen 2011;
Petersen et al. 2008), and on the subject under review. We adjusted the criteria to cover
all relevant papers that were of our knowledge and conducted pilot studies. A prior
version of this review was published at (Steinmacher et al. 2010). We considered the
feedbacks obtained during the submission and presentation of that paper.
The findings of this review may have also been affected as the classification is a
human process and it is based on some subjective criteria. In particular, the terms of the
area do not have a common definition among all studies, thus we need to interpret and
sometimes reword some concepts. This was particularly relevant for the classification
of the elements according to the 3C Model and Gutwin et al. framework. For example,
some authors called collaboration what we consider cooperation (and vice versa), or
called coordination what we consider cooperation, etc. Finally, we only considered
awareness elements that were specific to the DSD domain. Thus, general awareness
elements that support communication, coordination, and cooperation, but did not have
any particularity for the DSD domain were discarded. This interpretation of what is
specific to the DSD domain may also suffer from interpretation bias.
To reduce interpretation bias, this review involved two researchers cross checking
each paper for inclusion, and a third researcher responsible for reviewing and
discussing the information generated after each step. One of the researchers, besides
the academic background, has also actual experience on coordinating DSD teams,
being responsible for industry global software development (GSD) projects. Another
one has academic experience in coordinating a DSD project.
142 Igor Steinmacher et al.
Table 9. Distribution of papers according to Gutwin et al. Awareness Framework elements.
Elements References
Workspace Identity [PS01] [PS02] [PS04] [PS05] [PS06] [PS07] [PS08] [PS09] [PS10] [PS11] [PS12] [PS14]
[PS15] [PS16] [PS17] [PS18] [PS19] [PS22] [PS23] [PS24] [PS25] [PS26] [PS27] [PS28]
[PS29] [PS30] [PS32] [PS33] [PS34] [PS36] [PS37] [PS38] [PS39] [PS40] [PS41] [PS42]
[PS43] [PS44] [PS45] [PS46] [PS47] [PS48] [PS49] [PS50] [PS51] [PS52] [PS53] [PS54]
[PS55] [PS56] [PS57] [PS58] [PS59] [PS60] [PS61] [PS62] [PS63] [PS64] [PS65] [PS66]
[PS67] [PS68] [PS69] [PS71] [PS72] [PS73] [PS74] [PS75] [PS76] [PS77] [PS78] [PS79]
[PS80] [PS81] [PS82] [PS83] [PS84] [PS85] [PS86] [PS87] [PS89] [PS90] [PS91]
Location [PS32] [PS43] [PS73] [PS82]
Activity level [PS01] [PS02] [PS07] [PS14] [PS18] [PS28] [PS42] [PS44] [PS45] [PS48] [PS50] [PS53]
[PS55] [PS64] [PS66] [PS67] [PS68] [PS69] [PS71] [PS72] [PS75] [PS91]
Actions [PS04] [PS05] [PS06] [PS08] [PS14] [PS17] [PS18] [PS19] [PS22] [PS27] [PS29] [PS30]
[PS35] [PS36] [PS37] [PS38] [PS40] [PS42] [PS46] [PS48] [PS49] [PS51] [PS52] [PS54]
[PS55] [PS56] [PS57] [PS58] [PS59] [PS60] [PS62] [PS65] [PS68] [PS71] [PS73] [PS74]
[PS75] [PS76] [PS77] [PS78] [PS79] [PS80] [PS84] [PS85] [PS89] [PS90] [PS91]
Intentions [PS08] [PS29] [PS30] [PS43] [PS56] [PS65] [PS68] [PS79]
Changes [PS02] [PS03] [PS04] [PS05] [PS07] [PS08] [PS10] [PS14] [PS16] [PS17] [PS18] [PS19]
[PS22] [PS23] [PS27] [PS29] [PS30] [PS34] [PS35] [PS38] [PS39] [PS40] [PS41] [PS42]
[PS46] [PS47] [PS48] [PS49] [PS51] [PS52] [PS53] [PS54] [PS55] [PS56] [PS57] [PS58]
[PS59] [PS60] [PS61] [PS62] [PS64] [PS65] [PS66] [PS67] [PS68] [PS69] [PS71] [PS72]
[PS73] [PS74] [PS75] [PS76] [PS77] [PS78] [PS79] [PS80] [PS81] [PS82] [PS84] [PS85]
[PS86] [PS90] [PS91]
Objects [PS04] [PS05] [PS10] [PS16] [PS17] [PS18] [PS19] [PS22] [PS23] [PS24] [PS25] [PS27]
[PS29] [PS30] [PS36] [PS37] [PS38] [PS39] [PS40] [PS41] [PS42] [PS46] [PS48] [PS49]
[PS51] [PS52] [PS53] [PS54] [PS56] [PS57] [PS58] [PS59] [PS60] [PS61] [PS62] [PS65]
[PS66] [PS67] [PS68] [PS69] [PS71] [PS72] [PS74] [PS75] [PS77] [PS79] [PS80] [PS81]
[PS83] [PS84] [PS85] [PS87] [PS90] [PS91]
Extents [PS04] [PS05] [PS17] [PS27] [PS35] [PS38] [PS41] [PS49] [PS52] [PS56] [PS62] [PS71]
[PS83] [PS84] [PS91]
Abilities [PS04] [PS05] [PS07] [PS25] [PS33] [PS48] [PS63]
Sphere of Influence [PS03] [PS07] [PS10] [PS14] [PS15] [PS16] [PS19] [PS24] [PS25] [PS36] [PS37] [PS40]
[PS41] [PS42] [PS46] [PS55] [PS56] [PS58] [PS59] [PS61] [PS67] [PS68] [PS69] [PS76]
[PS77] [PS79] [PS85]
Informal Presence [PS04] [PS05] [PS06] [PS12] [PS17] [PS28] [PS29] [PS30] [PS35] [PS38] [PS43] [PS46]
[PS49] [PS56] [PS62] [PS63] [PS65] [PS75] [PS83] [PS84] [PS86] [PS89] [PS91]
Opinion [PS09] [PS11] [PS43]
Social Availability [PS04] [PS05] [PS17] [PS28] [PS43] [PS56] [PS63] [PS75] [PS84] [PS86] [PS89] [PS91]
Emotional Feelings [PS11] [PS17]
Group-Structural Roles and Responsibilities [PS04] [PS05] [PS11] [PS17] [PS33] [PS48] [PS49] [PS55] [PS65] [PS75] [PS82] [PS84]
[PS86] [PS90]

7. Conclusion
In this paper, we presented the results of a systematic review and mapping on the
support for awareness in DSD environments. By using a systematic method, we
obtained with some degree of confidence a comprehensive picture of the state of
art, which may guide other researchers to position their current researches or to
find new research opportunities. We estimate that we spent around 1500 men/
hour on the overall process.
During the selection of the papers, we could note the lack of standard terminology
in the area, which resulted in 1967 papers to start with, which filtered, resulted in 91
relevant papers in the area. Mapping these papers (Section 4), we showed that
awareness in DSD had not been widely studied until 2006 and we could note a high
number of papers appearing in 2010, the year in which we ran our query.
During the mapping, we also identified the main publication forums for
awareness studies in DSD and the most active researchers of the area. We could
observe a small propensity for Software Engineering forums, which comprised 53
Awareness Support in Distributed Software Development 143

(58 %) of the relevant studies. ICSE and its workshops was the main forum,
being responsible for 21 (23 %) of all the papers. Regarding the researchers of the
area, we could note some groups and some concentration. The five most active
researchers of the area published 26 % of the papers.
Analyzing the content of the selected papers, we could note that most part of
them (70 %) focused on introducing a new tool with some awareness support to
DSD. The predominant approach was to gather information from source code
version management repositories to provide some kind of awareness. As depicted
in Table 8, the most common awareness features identified in the papers were
change indication, conflict notification, and presence/status indication.
In terms of classification according to the 3C collaboration model, we may
conclude that most of the literature focused on awareness to support coordination,
while awareness support for communication was very poorly explored. However, it is
worth to note that we indeed found several tools in the area with support for
communication. Many studies we have analyzed, like (Bani-Salameh et al. 2008;
Duque et al. 2010; Penichet et al. 2008; Schümmer 2001), present means to support
communication, such as text chat, teleconference, and forum. However, they do not
present any awareness element to improve the communication in DSD scenario; they
presented just general communication awareness elements. As communication issues
are usually considered among the main difficulties when moving to a DSD scenario,
we consider this gap a good opportunity for future research. Awareness to support
communication can be fostered, for example, by taking advantage of semantics
extraction, and language formalization to reduce ambiguity and misunderstandings.
In our opinion, all three dimensions have open opportunities and gaps that can
become fruitful research areas (some of them were already stated in Section 5).
Regarding cooperation, an open research topic is offering awareness to support
software engineering phases that require cooperation among stakeholders with
different roles, like clients and business analysts during requirement specification and
functional tests. Coordination, even appearing as the main focus of awareness within
the DSD area, still presents some open opportunities like those described in
(Omoronyia et al. 2009a) and (Damian et al. 2007a), and summarized in Section 5.2.2.
Regarding Gutwin et al. Awareness Framework, we have observed that workspace
elements play a central role on DSD domain. However, some elements are still scarcely
studied. Embedding social environments within collaborative software engineering
environments, like Jazz [PS17] and SCI [PS05] can help overcoming isolation, lack of
team spirit, and other geographically related issues found on DSD. To do so, more
initiatives on Social and Informal awareness elements are necessary. In addition, it is
possible to observe that several concepts and techniques already investigated by the
CSCW community in other contexts may be adapted or extended to the DSD domain.
In addition to the analysis made in sections 5.2 and 5.3, it is possible to highlight
some other potential research topics that may be explored. We have not found papers
dealing with awareness to overcome issues related to cultural, political, and
144 Igor Steinmacher et al.

geographical differences, although these issues are frequently presented as motivation

on DSD studies. An opportunity is the definition of policies to provide awareness
within a DSD environment and to maintain privacy and information security for team
members and organizations. Another opportunity that may be explored is the use of
awareness elements not only to support the coding phase, but also to support other
software engineering phases, including project management, quality, and measure-
ment. We also did not find papers linking awareness in DSD and ubiquitous and mobile
computing. Merging these areas may be a promising research topic, since awareness is
already being discussed in ubiquitous computing for some time (Baldauf et al. 2007).
The results presented here can be applied in distinct ways, such as for aiding the
design and implementation of new DSD applications. It can also be considered a
starting point to establish issues upon which subsequent researches may focus on or
upon which developers may consider while designing DSD environments. This review
also presented an overview of how awareness is used on a collaborative domain. The
methodology applied here may also be used or adapted by other groupware researchers
while conducting systematic reviews for other CSCW domains.

Acknowledgments
This work was partially funded by Fundação Araucária. The authors would also
like to thank Gustavo Ansaldi Oliva and Giovanna Avalone for proofreading
preliminary versions of this document. Marco Aurélio Gerosa receives individual
grant from Brazilian National Research Council (CNPq).

Appendix A
Number Source Type of Study Reference
PS01 Scopus Case Study (Amrit and Hillegersberg 2008)
Theoretical Study
PS02 ACM Case Study (Assogba and Donath 2010)
Tool
PS03 ACM Tool (Bang et al. 2010)
PS04 Scopus Tool (Bani-Salameh et al. 2009)
PS05 Scopus Tool (Bani-Salameh et al. 2010)
PS06 Springer Tool (Bani-Salameh et al. 2008)
PS07 ACM Tool (Begel et al. 2010)
PS08 ACM Tool (Begel and Zimmermann 2010)
PS09 Springer Tool (Belgiorno et al. 2010)
PS10 Scopus Case Study (Bruegge et al. 2006)
Tool
PS11 ACM Tool (Calefato et al. 2009)
PS12 ACM Tool (Carter and Dewan 2010)
PS13 ACM Theoretical Study (Cataldo and Herbsleb 2009)
PS14 ACM Theoretical Study (Cataldo and Herbsleb 2010)
PS15 ACM Case Study (Cataldo et al. 2006)
Theoretical Study
Awareness Support in Distributed Software Development 145
PS16 Springer Experiment (Cepêda et al. 2010)
Tool
PS17 ACM Tool (Cheng et al. 2003)
PS18 IEEE Tool (Cook et al. 2004)
PS19 ACM Tool (da Silva et al. 2006)
PS20 IEEE Case Study (Damian et al. 2007a)
PS21 IEEE Case Study (Damian et al. 2007b)
PS22 ACM Tool (de Lucia et al. 2007a)
PS23 Science Direct Tool (de Lucia et al. 2007b)
PS24 ACM Tool (de Souza et al. 2007a)
PS25 Scopus Case Study (de Souza et al. 2007b)
Tool
PS26 ACM Tool (Dekel and Herbsleb 2008)
PS27 IEEE Experiment (Dewan et al. 2009)
Tool
PS28 IEEE Tool (Dullemond et al. 2010)
PS29 Springer Case Study (Duque et al. 2008)
Tool
PS30 Science Direct Tool (Duque et al. 2010)
PS31 IEEE Theoretical Study (Dustdar and Gall 2002 )
PS32 Scopus Case Study (Ehrlich and Chang 2006)
Theoretical Study
PS33 ACM Case Study (Ehrlich et al. 2007)
Tool
PS34 ACM Theoretical Study (Estublier and Garcia 2005)
Tool
PS35 ACM Tool (Everitt et al. 2003)
PS36 ISI Tool (Farshchian 2000)
PS37 Science Direct Tool (Farshchian 2001)
PS38 Scopus Experiment (Favela et al. 2004)
Tool
PS39 ACM Case Study (Fitzpatrick et al. 2006)
Tool
PS40 Scopus Tool (Fokaefs et al. 2009)
PS41 Scopus Experiment (Froehlich and Dourish 2004)
Tool
PS42 Scopus Case Study (German and Hindle 2006)
Tool
PS43 ACM Tool (Geyer et al. 2001)
PS44 Scopus Case Study (Gilbert and Karahalios 2007)
Tool
PS45 Scopus Case Study (Gilbert and Karahalios 2009)
Tool
PS46 Scopus Tool (Guimarães and Rito-Silva 2010)
PS47 ACM Case Study (Gutwin et al. 2004)
Theoretical Study
PS48 Scopus Tool (Gutwin et al. 2005)
PS49 Scopus Experiment (Hanks 2008)
Tool
PS50 Scopus Tool (Harward et al. 2010)
PS51 ACM Tool (Hattori 2010)
146 Igor Steinmacher et al.

PS52 ACM Tool (Hattori and Lanza 2010)

PS53 Scopus Tool (Hattori and Lanza 2009a)
PS54 Scopus Experiment (Hattori and Lanza 2009b)
Tool
PS55 Springer Case Study (Hattori et al. 2010)
Tool
PS56 Scopus Experiment (Hegde and Dewan 2008)
Tool
PS57 Springer Experiment (Helming et al. 2009)
Tool
PS58 ACM Tool (Holmes and Walker 2008)
PS59 ACM Tool (Holmes and Walker 2010)
PS60 IEEE Tool (Ignat 2008)
PS61 Springer Tool (Ignat and Oster 2008)
PS62 Scopus Tool (Mangan et al. 2002)
PS63 ACM Experiment (Minto and Murphy 2007)
Tool
PS64 ACM Tool (Mockus and Herbsleb 2002)
PS65 IEEE Tool (Nutter and Boldyreff 2003)
PS66 Scopus Case Study (Ogawa and Ma 2008)
Tool
PS67 Scopus Tool (Omoronyia et al. 2007)
PS68 Scopus Theoretical Study (Omoronyia et al. 2009a)
Experiment
Tool
PS69 Scopus Tool (Omoronyia et al. 2009b)
PS70 Scopus Experiment (Park and Jensen 2009)
PS71 Springer Experiment (Penichet et al. 2008)
Tool
PS72 Springer Tool (Proença et al. 2010)
PS73 ISI Theoretical Study (Redmiles et al. 2007)
Tool
PS74 Scopus Case Study (Ripley et al. 2007)
Tool
PS75 ACM Tool (Salinger et al. 2010)
PS76 ACM Experiment (Sarma et al. 2007)
Tool
PS77 ACM Experiment (Sarma et al. 2009)
Tool
PS78 Scopus Tool (Sarma et al. 2003)
PS79 ACM Experiment (Sarma et al. 2008)
Tool
PS80 IEEE Tool (Sarma and van der Hoek 2002)
PS81 Scopus Tool (Sarma and van der Hoek 2003)
PS82 IEEE Theoretical Study (Sarma and van der Hoek 2006)
Tool
PS83 Scopus Tool (Schümmer 2001)
PS84 Springer Tool (Schümmer and Lukosch 2008)
PS85 ACM Tool (Servant et al. 2010)
Awareness Support in Distributed Software Development 147
PS86 Scopus Case Study (Sinha et al. 2006)
Tool
PS87 Scopus Case Study (Stapel et al. 2009)
Theoretical Study
PS88 ACM Survey or Systematic (Storey et al. 2005)
Review
PS89 ACM Case Study (Venolia et al. 2010)
Tool
PS90 Springer Theoretical Study (Wahyudin et al. 2008)
PS91 Scopus Tool (Ye et al. 2009)

Note
1. http://www.friendfeed.com

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