What Information Would You Like to Know about Your Co-worker? A Case Study

The lack of face-to-face interaction in Distributed Software Development (DSD) projects is a great obstacle for informal communication, which is the way in which we normally discover more about the co-workers along with building trust. Since we are attempting to reinforce the team spirit and improve trust between co-workers, we have analyzed what information software engineers consider to be important to know about their virtual colleagues. In this paper we describe the preliminary results obtained from this study and outline the features of a tool, called Trusting Social Network, with which to support DSD and help stakeholders to know each other better.