Context-Aware Notification in Global Software Development

Global software development (GSD) projects should allow efficient development of complex software systems while teams coming from diverse cultural backgrounds, technical capabilities, and time zones work together. However, GSD projects are also complex socio-technical systems which face the challenge of facilitating collaboration in a heterogeneous and changing technical environment. §§This book presents: §§1) A model to describe GSD projects as socio-technical systems and analyze their risks and weak spots in order to support the project manager weigh the trade-offs between resources, quality and schedule that come with changes in the project plan. §§2) A domain-specific language for notification modeling, which allows precise and user-friendly modeling of the notification requirements. §§3) The tool prototype Noticon, which integrates the work tools that are used in GSD projects via open source technologies (Mule, ActiveMQ, Drools) in order to provide rich notification capabilities. §§4) A feasibility study for the evaluation of the model and the tool prototype conducted in cooperation with experts from Siemens PSE in the context of a typical GSD environment. Global software development (GSD) projects should allow efficient development of complex software systems while teams coming from diverse cultural backgrounds, technical capabilities, and time zones work together. However, GSD projects are also complex socio-technical systems which face the challenge of facilitating collaboration in a heterogeneous and changing technical environment. §This book presents: §1) A model to describe GSD projects as socio-technical systems and analyze their risks and weak spots in order to support the project manager weigh the trade-offs between resources, quality and schedule that come with changes in the project plan. §2) A domain-specific language for notification modeling, which allows precise and user-friendly modeling of the notification requirements. §3) The tool prototype Noticon, which integrates the work tools that are used in GSD projects via open source technologies (Mule, ActiveMQ, Drools) in order to provide rich notification capabilities. §4) A feasibility study for the evaluation of the model and the tool prototype conducted in cooperation with experts from Siemens PSE in the context of a typical GSD environment.