=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=None
|storemode=property
|title=Microblogging in Global Software Development
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-731/17.pdf
|volume=Vol-731
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/caise/Klimpke11
}}
==Microblogging in Global Software Development==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-731/17.pdf
Microblogging in Global Software Development
Lars Klimpke
Department of General Management and Information Systems
University of Mannheim
68131 Mannheim, Germany
klimpke@uni-mannheim.de
Abstract. Despite the current trend towards global software development, many
software enterprises lack effective media for communication and collaboration.
Moreover, social media are gaining attraction especially in private settings but are
largely neglected in the context of distributed software development. Therefore,
the goal of this design-oriented research endeavor is to develop a methodology
and a corresponding tool to support communication, collaboration, and traceabil-
ity in global software development. In order to address this goal, a microblogging
tool is being adapted to the specific needs of developers working in distributed
settings.
Keywords: Global Software Development, Social Media, Microblogging, Trace-
ability
1 Introduction
Global software development (GSD) is gaining increasing attraction. Major drivers for
this trend are gains in flexibility, expected cost savings, or faster development cycles
due to round-the-clock development [1]. However, GSD complicates collaboration be-
tween team members working at different sites. This is why it often does not lead to the
expected outcomes. For instance, awareness is hard to achieve in terms of (1) who is
working on which task, (2) who is working at a certain moment, and (3) whom to con-
tact about what [1–4]. Furthermore, it is necessary – especially in distributed settings –
to provide traceability information within the development process [5].
Another trend of the last decade is the growth of Social Media in private as well
as enterprise settings. Despite the fact that these media bear high potentials especially
for GSD, the role of social media usage in software engineering is not well understood
[6]. For instance, microblogging with its informal character and its focus on enhanc-
ing awareness has the potential to address problems in GSD that result from temporal,
spatial, and cultural distance.
In order to support GSD, this design-oriented research endeavor aims at the follow-
ing objectives:
1. To develop a methodology to enhance awareness, communication, collaboration,
and traceability in global software development and
2. to design a software tool that supports this methodology.
2 Lars Klimpke
The remainder of this research proposal is structured as follows: the underlying
foundations are presented in the next section, followed by a review of prior research, the
deduction of the proposed approach, and the presentation of the research methodology
in Section 3. Finally, Section 4 concludes the proposal.
2 Foundations
2.1 Global Software Development
Enterprises increasingly create software in so-called virtual teams that are “internation-
ally distributed groups of people with an organizational mandate to make or implement
decisions with international components and implications” [7, p. 473]. This enables
people to work collectively on interdependent tasks without being in the same orga-
nization or at the same place, not even in the same time zone [8]. That means that the
virtual team does not have shared workplaces, as some team members may live in North
America or Asia while others live in Europe.
Today, not only large enterprises engage in GSD; it is gaining attraction even for
small and medium sized enterprises [9]. Enterprises conducting GSD hope to gain flex-
ibility, reduce development times by round-the-clock development, decrease labor costs
by employing people in lower-wage countries, and access a larger and better-skilled de-
veloper pool [1–3]. But besides the advantages of GSD, virtual teams struggle with
complex settings in distributed projects. In addition to common challenges of software
development, virtual teams have to deal with GSD-specific challenges resulting from
the geographical, temporal, and cultural distances [3, 10]. Especially the knowledge
transfer across these distances is challenging [11]. Altogether, this results in higher ef-
forts for communication and coordination and, thus, in higher development costs.
Some of these problems can be contained by maintaining traceability of the whole
development project [5, 12]. In this context, traceability is “the ability to relate arti-
facts created during the development of a software system to describe the system from
different perspectives and levels of abstraction with each other, the stakeholders that
have contributed to the creation of artifacts, and the rationale that explains the form
of artifacts” [13]. Thus, it is an important process that facilitates acquisition and use
of process knowledge [14]. Traceability also implies the management of rationale in-
formation that is, for instance, the capturing of reasons that led to decisions regarding
the design of artifacts [12]. Therefore, traceability and rationale management (TRM) is
used as one common concept in this paper.
2.2 Social Media and Microblogging
Since the last decade, Social Media have been used to a greater extent in all aspects
of life. However, there is no clear definition for the term Social Media in research un-
til now. Most definitions agree on the aspect that Social Media involve user-generated
content. These users are part of an online community based upon a service or a prod-
uct [15]. They communicate via text, audio and/or video messaging to publish their
thoughts, ideas, and opinions in order to share them with anyone around the world. Us-
ing Social Media, nearly all content is linked to a known author and can be traced back
Microblogging in Global Software Development 3
accordingly. Social Media changed the user behavior from “a passive, reading audience
into active, contributing participants” [15, p. 1]. Thus, Social Media are mainly about
participation, openness, conversation, community, and connectedness. While the popu-
larity of Social Media tools has grown over the last years especially in a private context,
many enterprises are currently establishing policies regulating the use of Social Media.
Some enterprises follow progressive strategies creating sets of dedicated tools to use,
others try to block the use of Social Media at work as far as possible.
In GSD, Social Media can be used to support communication [6], which in turn is
a key success factor [16]. Social Media tools can be distinguished into different genres
with different foci: (1) (collaborative) content creation tools, (2) content sharing tools,
(3) virtual worlds, and (4) social networks (based on [17]). This research endeavor
focuses on microblogging tools, which can be seen as more simple types of social net-
works that concentrate on posting short thoughts and ideas to a personal blog and are
also known as notification tools or quick-ping media [18]. Microblogs allow people to
write short messages (usually around 140 characters) in a rather informal way and, thus,
support ad-hoc communication [19]. The most prominent examples are Twitter1 and the
enterprise microblogging tool Yammer2 .
3 Using Microblogging for Software Development
3.1 Related Research
This research endeavor aims at integrating microblogging into the working environment
of developers. The idea of integrating communication media into an integrated develop-
ment envoronment (IDE) is not entirely new. For instance, Fitzpatrick et al. developed
an event notification system that integrates the Concurrent Version System (CVS) and
chat functionalities with the goal to increase awareness, coordination, and communica-
tion [20].
Handel et al. introduced instant messaging capabilities into development environ-
ments in order to increase awareness [21]. Additionally, Sinha et al. aimed at supporting
collaboration and awareness in distributed requirements management and developed a
collaborative tool with functions for informal communication and change management
[22]. Their tool was integrated into the Eclipse IDE and supports synchronous as well
as asynchronous communication around requirements.
More recently, research on the use of social media and microblogging in software
development emerged. For instance, Storey et al. discussed the use of social media in
software development [6]. They reported a trend from integrated development envi-
ronments to collaborative development environments and social development environ-
ments. Additionally, they demanded further research regarding the use of social media
in software development.
Reinhardt presents an approach that integrates microblogging features into an IDE
[19]. This approach facilitates ad-hoc communication via twitter, however, does not
1
http://www.twitter.com (03/15/11)
2
http://www.yammer.com (03/15/11)
4 Lars Klimpke
include features like the support for traceability and rationale management as intended
in this research endeavor.
Guzzi et al. implemented a tool that integrates a microblogging-like environment
into the Eclipse IDE in order to aid software developers in understanding and doc-
umenting the development progress [23]. Their overall goal was to support software
maintenance and to avoid the loss of knowledge. Therefore, they automatically col-
lected interaction data from the IDE. Interestingly, Guzzi et al. discovered that the typ-
ical length of messages created by software developers is approximately 55 characters.
Thus, 140 characters as used in Twitter seem to be enough to satisfy the needs of devel-
opers [23].
Apart from academic efforts, a couple of tools that integrate Twitter into the Eclipse
IDE emerged, as, for instance, Tweethub3 , Twitclipse4 , Twikle5 , and Twitterclipse6 . All
these tools provide Twitter user interfaces that are integrated into the Eclipse IDE. A
different approach is realized by the Snipper tool7 . This tool is intended to let developers
share code snippets via Twitter.
All tools mentioned generally focus on displaying microblogs and provide the abil-
ity to send messages to Twitter accounts. They lack the ability to support TRM as it is
intended in this research endeavor (by linking messages with source files they relate to,
for instance) and are not integrated into an enterprise environment. Additionally, none
of these approaches has been evaluated in an appropriate way in order to prove its use-
fulness. Nevertheless, it is obvious that microblogging integration is gaining attraction
in the software development community. However, no current tool or collaborative de-
velopment environment supports all the activities for global software engineering [24].
3.2 Proposed Approach and First Results
The steps of this research endeavor are briefly summarized in Table 1. As a first step,
case studies with eight small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) that work in glob-
ally distributed settings have been conducted [9]. These case studies revealed current
problems of SME in GSD. Among others, SME report communication issues, missing
domain knowledge and knowledge transfer as well as spatial distance and time differ-
ences as major obstacles in GSD [9]. In order to address these problems, the objective
of this research endeavor is to develop a methodology that increases awareness, com-
munication, collaboration, and TRM in GSD and to design a tool that demonstrates the
methodology. This methodology is intended to aid developers in GSD by providing ac-
cess to the social capital of the developers, to support asynchronous and synchronous
communication, and to provide an additional means for documentation.
As a second step, requirements for such an approach were deduced from Media
Synchronicity Theory (MST) [25, 26] as well as from the concept of Social Capital
(SC) [27–29]. In a nutshell, the following requirements were deduced:
3
http://wiki.eclipse.org/TweetHub (03/15/11)
4
http://twitclipse.sourceforge.net (03/15/11)
5
http://www.creative-mindworks.de/twikle (03/15/11)
6
http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/twitterclipse (03/15/11
7
http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/snipper-code-sharing-service (03/15/11)
Microblogging in Global Software Development 5
Table 1. Research Endeavor
S TEP R ESULTS / P LANNED ACTIVITY S TATUS
Case studies Need for support for communication and collaboration identi- Done
fied.
Theoretical deduction of Deduction of requirements from media synchronicity theory Done
requirements and the concept of social capital. Assessment of social media
and communication media regarding these requirements. De-
cision to concentrate on microblogging.
Prove of relevance for Case study to prove relevance for practice of the theoretically In
practice deduced requirements. progress
Market research Decision to use Eclipse and status.net. Done
Development of the Development of guidelines that support communication and In
methodology collaboration of developers in distributed settings and that al- progress
lows them to realize TRM in a simple way.
Adaption of a web appli- Familiarization with status.net, configuration, and implemen- In
cation tation of add-ons. progress
Development of an IDE Development of a plug-in for Eclipse that supports microblog- Planned
plug-in ging on the one hand and facilitates better traceability on the
other hand.
Evaluation Evaluation of the approach in an experimental setting in a stu- Planned
dent project with experimental and control group.
– Informal communication in terms of (1) communication that is not directly work re-
lated as this aims at creating team building and trust and in terms of (2) the informal
character of the messages as this encourages non-native speakers to communicate
in the project language should be supported.
– Synchronous communication should be enabled but not be enforced.
– Awareness of team members should be enhanced.
– Team members should be enabled to maintain and use existing as well as “indirect”
SC by stimulating their awareness of each other. Indirect SC is the SC of ones
contacts, for instance.
– Connecting different actors should be facilitated.
– The approach should be lightweight and straightforward to use. Thus, appropriate
solutions should be integrated into the usual working environment of the users.
Additionally, the following requirements were derived from software engineering
practice:
– Users should be able to document any changes and discussions in a simple way.
Thus, TRM should be supported.
– The solution should fit to enterprise settings. Public solutions like Twitter, for in-
stance, should not be used in an enterprise context, due to security issues.
These theoretically deduced and conceptually derived requirements are being proved
for practice relevance in an intermediary step. An assessment of communication media
and social media regarding these requirements has led to the decision to concentrate on
microblogging to support GSD, especially since microblogging supports synchronous
6 Lars Klimpke
as well as asynchronous communication and provides an easy means for the enhance-
ment of users’ awareness of each other [30]. Additionally, microblogging is a rather
passive medium that reduces email overload, i.e., users are not – like with email –
forced to read and work on messages [31]. Finally, microblogging functionalities can
easily be integrated into other tools in order to complement these with the respective
features.
Besides the development of a methodology and the adaption of a web application,
it is planned to develop a plug-in for an IDE. This plug-in is intended to be integrated
into the common working environment of developers. Additionally, the plug-in should
allow for connecting discussions via the microblogging tool directly with the part of the
code they are related to in order to support TRM.
As a third step, extensive market research led to the decision to use the Eclipse IDE8
and the microblogging-tool status.net9 . The market research for social media comprised
71 tools in total. All of them have been analyzed regarding their license model and func-
tionality. The status.net tool already provides a lot of necessary functions for the web
application and is available under a creative commons attribution license and, there-
fore, fulfilled the requirements best. Eclipse was chosen due to its license model and its
widespread use in the software development community.
The fourth step is the development of the methodology, followed by the adaption of
status.net and the development of the Eclipse plug-in. Until now, the development phase
of the methodology and the web application has started. The next steps will be to finish
development on these tasks and to develop the Eclipse plug-in. Finally, the approach
will be evaluated regarding usefulness and effectiveness in an experimental setting, i.e.,
in a student’s project with control group and experimental group.
By creating and evaluating an IT artifact, this research endeavor follows a design-
science approach [32]. Table 2 summarizes the compliance with the requirements for
design science research according to Hevner et al. [32].
4 Conclusion
Using microblogging to support awareness, communication, collaboration, and TRM
is a promising approach for tackling ongoing problems in GSD that needs further aca-
demic advice. A step into this direction is provided by this research endeavor that aims
at integrating microblogging into a development environment. Herewith, awareness be-
tween distributed team members will be enhanced, team members will be able to ex-
change their knowledge on urgent tasks in an easy and informal way, and traceability
of software development projects will be supported.
Acknowledgment
This doctoral research is being supervised by Prof. Armin Heinzl and is supported by
the German state of Baden-Württemberg within the research project “GlobaliSE”.
8
http://www.eclipse.org (03/15/11)
9
http://status.net (03/15/11)
Microblogging in Global Software Development 7
Table 2. Mapping against Design Science Guidelines
G UIDELINE C ONTRIBUTION
Design as an Artifact The research outcomes (methodology and tool) can be mapped
against methods and instantiation.
Problem Relevance The research problem addresses current issues in GSD and the need
for a solution is derived from empirical data.
Design Evaluation Utility and efficiency of the designed artifacts will be evaluated in
an experimental setting.
Research Contributions The design artifacts and the design construction extend and improve
existing knowledge in GSD.
Research Rigor The design principles and the need for such a solution are deduced
from theory.
Design as as Search Process Iteration loops between artifact development and theoretical work
lead to the final artifact.
Communication of Research Technical details will be provided for technical audiences; impli-
cations and guidelines will be provided for management oriented
audiences.
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