Analysis of workspace awareness tools in distributed software development

Distributed software teams face challenge in coordination while doing collaborative software development. Another related issue which developers come across is merge conflicts. Merge conflicts detected at later stage are costly to resolve and negatively affect productivity. Workspace awareness tools have come into play to facilitate the situation by giving awareness of developer's activities to other developers in the team. Goal of this paper is to investigate these tools and to find gaps in them. Also the analysis led to draw new set of requirements removing those drawbacks.