Virtual Open Conversation Spaces: Towards Improved Awareness in a GSE Setting

Conversations between colleagues in collaborative software engineering are important for coordinating work, sharing knowledge and creating knowledge. Overhearing conversations of others is useful as well since this: (i) provides access to the information discussed in the conversations, (ii) offers the possibility of joining the conversations and (iii) provides insight in the communication structure of the project team. When working in a GSE setting, specialized tooling is required to be able to have conversations and to know what conversations others are having. In this paper we discuss how conversations support collaborative software engineering and how this can be supported by technology in a GSE environment. To do this, we introduce Communico: a virtual open conversation space which features: (i) initiating conversations by selecting people to converse with, (ii) sharing information regarding the involvement of project members in these conversations and (iii) having access to persistent conversations with an explicit status indicating whether they are ongoing.