Analyzing the Scalability of Awareness Networks in a Distributed Software Development Project

Awareness has been a very important concept in the CSCW field. Arguably, this concept is about the fact that an actor needs to monitor the work of his colleagues and, at the same time, inform them about his own work. This facilitates the coordination of collaborative activities. Despite important previous work on this topic, none directly addresses the number of actors that each actor should monitor and, similarly, the number of actors this same actor should inform their activities to. This set of actors is called the 'awareness network'. This paper presents an analysis of the scalability of awareness networks in the context of a large-scale distributed software development project. Our results can be used to inform the design of tools for collaborative software development.