Fostering Cross-site Coordination through Awareness: An Investigation of State-of-the-Practice through a Focus Group Study

Awareness and shared knowledge are important ingredients of successful coordination in software engineering projects, and especially when team members are distributed. Although various coordination mechanisms and knowledge sharing recommendations for cross-site collaboration have been proposed, spreading awareness among distributed team members in a global software project has proven to be challenging in practice. In this paper we discuss our findings from conducting three focus groups on knowledge management in global software collaborations in two international organizations. We discuss various awareness needs in globally distributed collaborations that were not addressed by the organizations, and conclude that best practices and tools proposed in related research are not widely used. On the basis of our empirical findings we suggest future research directions and share recommendations for practical improvements.