Towards the evaluation of awareness information support applied to peer reviews of software engineering diagrams

Evaluation of group support is a complex task and its design must be carefully planned in order to produce useful results. Many factors may influence evaluation design, some of which have been suggested in the literature. However, in a particular evaluation context, additional factors may arise, influencing and even compromising the evaluation design. We argue that preliminary evaluations must be performed before they are conducted in a real setting in order to verify if its design will provide the expected measurements and results. This paper presents the evaluation process of awareness information resources within software diagram peer reviews. The paper describes the evaluation context, objectives, plan and design together with enactment of a preliminary case study following this design. From this preliminary study, we outline issues that arose during its enactment that influenced refinement of the evaluation design.