An exploratory study on open conversation spaces in Software Engineering

Software engineering is by nature a highly collaborative activity and being able to collaborate effectively is a key factor for project success. However, collaborating effectively in Global Software Engineering, in which team members are geographically, temporally and socio-culturally separated from each other, is an important challenge. In a traditional colocated Software Engineering setting, one of the most important communication patterns is a conversation. Technological support to have conversations in a distributed setting is commonly used, however overhearing conversations of your colleagues is mostly not feasible with these tools. To explore the importance of overhearing conversations we conducted a focus group and a questionnaire in a large international software development company. In this paper we report on the qualitative data from the focus group and the quantification of this data researched with the questionnaire. Based on these findings we will make recommendations on how to support overhearing conversations in Global Software Engineering.