When to interrupt global software engineers to provide them with what information?

Software Engineering is a highly collaborative activity in which knowledge about the work context is essential to collaborate effectively. Acquiring such knowledge is difficult in a distributed setting, since developers have to manually analyze, filter and combine available information in order to acquire a sufficient level of awareness. Therefore, it seems beneficial to construct a mechanism which automatically regulates information based on both the current activity of a software engineer and the importance of the new information. In this paper we present an Estimate-Talk-Estimate study, with experienced software engineers, in which we studied both (i) what information software engineers want to know immediately and (ii) when software engineers do not mind to be interrupted with such information. The main findings include a list of information items which software engineers want to be immediately informed about, and a list of activities during which software engineers prefer not to be interrupted.