Designing Software Cockpits for Coordinating Distributed Software Development

Coordination of global software development is particularly difficult as it involves teams that are distributed across different locations and time zones. One of the key issues is a lack of understanding of how activities of different teams (and team members) relate to one another. To provide situational awareness for distributed teams, software cockpits, at-a-glance computer-controlled displays of data collected from multiple sources, have been proposed. In this paper, the authors introduce a set of design decisions that need to be considered for building software cockpits, present the approach to realizing such a cockpit based on three exploratory visualizations of distributed software development projects, and conclude with a discussion of lessons learned so far.