A middleware to increase awareness in distributed software development workspaces

Distributed software development characterizes software production when team members are dispersed over time and distance. Several environments and tools are being developed to support this trend. Better communication and awareness support are some of the requirements. We argue that the available tools can be enhanced instead of replaced. This work presents a middleware for collaborative applications that increase group and workspace awareness information available to developers. This middleware-based approach helps groupware developers to construct enhanced tools, adapted to specific needs, reusing existing applications. This work describes the middleware architecture and presents examples of tool enhancement.