Essboard: a collaborative tool for using Essence in software development

Knowing the current situation and goals of software development is an activity that takes into account the participation of the whole team in the evaluation of many aspects of it. The Essence standard provides a set of basic aspects that are presented in any software development, which helps achieve this goal. Currently, a set of tools has been developed to support Essence for that activity, however, they leave aside the participation and collaboration of the team, which is necessary to generate a common vision of the state and goals of a project. In this paper, we propose Essboard, a tool that takes a collaborative approach by putting in the forefront, the perspective of each member and the holistic vision of the team about the situation and progress of a project. We confirm that Essboard fulfills this goal through a Formal Technical Review (FTR) based on an Awareness Checklist, showing a noticeable improvement to the support of the collaboration in contrast to the existing Essence tools.