An Exploratory Study on Open Conversation Spaces in Software Engineering

Software engineering is by nature a highly collaborative activity and being able to collaborate effectively is a key factor for project success. However, collaborating effectively in Global Software Engineering, in which team members are geographically, temporally and socio-culturally separated from each other, is an important challenge. In a traditional co-located Software Engineering setting, one of the most important communication patterns is a conversation. Technological support to have conversations in a distributed setting is commonly used, however overhearing conversations of one colleagues is mostly not feasible with these tools.