Abstract For years, industry institutions and academic researchers have been surveying software practitioners on agile software development methods adoption. These surveys have been useful in describing the characteristics, challenges, and impacts of agile adoption, mainly in Europe and North America. Latin American practitioners miss information on the state of agile adoption. This study aims to fill this gap by describing agile software development adoption in Brazil. We collected data from 897 countrywide-distributed practitioners. We used descriptive statistics and machine learning algorithms to understand our dataset. Results show the profile of companies and teams, characteristics of agile usage, perception of success, applied principles and practices, and reasons, challenges and impacts of agile adoption. We also explore the relevance of principles in software process improvements. We contribute by mapping the state-of-the-practice of agile adoption in Brazil and by contrasting our results to previous literature, which points out how we further current knowledge in academia.

Experimentation can be used to validate software solutions, reducing waste on efforts and costs that would be spent had the solution not been validated from the beginning. Aware of experimentation benefits, a methodology named as Lean Startup have incorporated experiments and build-measure-learn loop as a manner to reduce waste from product development by focusing on efforts that will create value to customers, such as discovering the best solution. Aiming to characterize the use of experimentation in light of Lean Startup, we conducted a case study with two software development teams from a multinational information technology company. We characterize how experimentation works by teams perception, what are the benefits and challenges in the use of it. We identified in the study that experimentation was rooted in the workers' mindset and came up naturally should its need arise. Our findings indicate that the process of experimentation, albeit still a systematic effort, happens organically, and that it helps in development decisions and in reducing development efforts. Challenges are related to organizational culture and lack of belief in the approach by stakeholders.

Design Thinking (DT) has been chosen as an approach to support problem-solving by many software development companies. However, there are divergences between the professionals of these companies concerning which techniques are performed, which steps are followed, and the way to implement this approach, as it proposes itself, to be divergent to generate numerous alternatives and, also, convergent, to find a solution. For this reason, aiming to characterize how the software companies have been implemented DT, this paper presents the results of a survey answered by 127 professionals from the Brazilian software industry. The results report a variety of scenarios in which DT has been applied: more than ten different models (sets of steps) are followed by the professionals; more than 50 techniques have been used, mainly, for meeting the needs in the process, according to the context of use and based on previous experiences. We also present 29 computational tools that, according to the respondents, assist the execution of DT, in addition to the integration with agile methods, allowing them to generate ideas and solutions, to explore and understand the problem.

The combined use of User-Centered Design and Lean Startup with Agile Development has been pointed out by the literature as a manner to boost software development. User-Centered Design principles focus on providing tools for developers to better explore user needs and seek for a fitter solution. Lean Startup, on the other hand, supplements the triad combination by bringing the Build-Measure-Learn cycle and the concept of pivoting, either the problem understanding or the proposed solution. This paper reports on a case study of two software teams that have been undergoing the changes and impacts of such combined adoption. We investigated these teams for six months, from the moment that team members were trained on the job to grasp the essence of using the integrated approach inspired on Pivotal Labs proposal to the time they were considered mature enough to share their experiences with others within the organization. Through our in-depth study, we illustrate how this adoption promotes changes regarding to mindset, activities, practices, and techniques. We also report on the ‘team rhythm’ (or work flow) as experienced by the two teams. The paper contributes to current knowledge on the topic reporting on the changes and impacts that teams observed during the combined approach adoption.

The development of systems with different features becomes increasingly challenging, given the actual context, implying on the search for new approaches for requirements elicitation. One of these approaches is design thinking (DT), a process of encouraging innovation used by designers, which presents itself as fundamental in the success of new products. This scenario motivates the importance of knowing DT concepts and their techniques, which can support requirements elicitation. In this context, the authors present DTA4RE (DT assistant for requirements elicitation), a tool that suggests DT techniques for requirements elicitation, which can be used by both students and professionals who would like to adopt DT in their projects. The DTA4RE is composed of a set of 27 techniques that could be suggested to the user through a recommendation questionnaire as well as an open repository with material to support the application of these techniques. Results from the authors’ two empirical studies with software engineering undergraduate and graduate students and industry professionals indicate that DTA4RE has helped in the selection of and in the learning of DT techniques when considering real problems. Most participants considered the questions from the recommendation questionnaire easy to answer, and the techniques suggested by the tool useful.

Background: Despite the claimed benefits of an agile transformation, user involvement and added value are still reported as challenges in software development. A combined use of User-Centered Design and Lean Startup with Agile Development has been pointed out as a means to minimize these challenges. Aims: This paper aimed to characterize how a transformation to such combined approach takes place in a multinational company, as well as to point out benefits and challenges to undergo such transformation. Method: We performed a multiple case study. We collected data through semi-structured interviews, focus group session, questionnaire and observations. Results: Our study revealed two major strategies to conduct the transformation: to create a dedicated Transformation Team to lead it and to make a Transformation Package Toolkit available to team members. Also, introducing a Product Designer role to a cross-functional team and using experimentation are among the most important benefits. Managerial mindset change and team autonomy are among the most concerning challenges. Conclusions: Our results bring implications to industry practitioners: organizational and cultural changes involve role and responsibilities definitions, introduction of new working processes, and are dependent upon user engagement and managerial support. These sound paramount to organizations that aim to succeed in this yet-to-be-further-understood transformation.

In the past few years, data lakes emerged as a trending topic in big data technologies.Although literature presents different points of view related to its functionalities, it serves mainly to store a variety of data in a big data context.In this paper, we aim to identify and analyze data lake definitions and possible architectures.Our methodology was composed of a systematic literature mapping based on PRISMA, software engineering best practices to perform reviews, and Kappa method to assess results' quality.We performed the search in eight different electronic databases to achieve a wide variety of publishers in Computer Science.We first identified 662 papers matching our search criteria; after filtering, we selected 87 papers for review.We found that the term data lakes was first defined by James Dixon in 2010.We also found that the term is often related to raw data repositories.From the identified definitions, we propose a new one as a means to better state what data lakes refer to and improve how the community use them.Moreover, we foind that Hadoop and its ecosystem compose the most used toolset to create data lakes, revealing that this is the mainstream in architectures for data lakes as of today's available technologies.

Context: Tabular and graphical representations are used to communicate security risk assessments for IT systems. However, there is no consensus on which type of representation better supports the comprehension of risks (such as the relationships between threats, vulnerabilities and security controls). Vessey's cognitive fit theory predicts that graphs should be better because they capture spatial relationships. Method: We report the results of two studies performed in two countries with 69 and 83 participants respectively, in which we assessed the effectiveness of tabular and graphical representations concerning the extraction of correct information about security risks. Results: Participants who applied tabular risk models gave more precise and complete answers to the comprehension questions when requested to find simple and complex information about threats, vulnerabilities, or other elements of the risk models. Conclusions: Our findings can be explained by Vessey's cognitive fit theory as tabular models implicitly capture elementary linear spatial relationships. Interest for ICSE: It is almost taken for granted in Software Engineering that graphical-, diagram-based models are "the" way to go (e.g., the SE Body of Knowledge [3]). This paper provides some experimental-based doubts that this might not always be the case. It will provide an interesting debate that might ripple to traditional requirements and design notations outside security.

Non-functional requirements define the overall qualities or attributes of a system. Although important, they are often neglected for many reasons, such as pressure of time and budget. In agile software development, there is a focus on the feature implementation and delivery of value to the customer and, as such, non-functional aspects of a system should also be of attention. Non-functional requirements testing is challenging due its cross-functional aspects and lack of clarity of their needs by business in the most part of projects. The goal of this paper is to empirically investigate how do agile team members handle non-functional testing in their projects, aiming to identify preliminary factors influencing the testing of non-functional requirements, specifically performance and security in agile development. We conducted interviews with twenty IT professionals in large multinational company. As result we could identify seven main factors influencing non-functional testing and four main practices adopted by them to overcome the challenges faced. We aim to replicate our investigation in a larger scale. Meanwhile, our work provides initial contributions to practitioners and inspires our future research.

Managers need to decide on how they will configure their virtual teams each time a new project starts. So questions such as 'Which countries should be involved in the project?' and 'How large should the team size be?' need to be answered before hand. Project configurations are known to affect communication, coordination and collaboration aspects of a project, and as a consequence, its performance. Therefore, a challenge managers face is knowing which configurations promote better project outcomes when working with virtual software teams. This article reveals a set of configurations that have promoted the quality of software products developed by virtual teams to support the business of a Fortune 500 large IT multinational company. These configurations can be used as a guideline by managers to set up their own virtual teams. Recommendations on how to set up virtual teams based on the study are then suggested.

During the past few years, with the fast development and proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT), many application areas have started to exploit this new computing paradigm. The number of active computing devices has been growing at a rapid pace in IoT environments around the world. Consequently, a mechanism to deal with this different devices has become necessary. Middleware systems solutions for IoT have been developed in both research and industrial environments to supply this need. However, decision analytics remain a critical challenge. In this work we present the Decision Support IoT Framework composed of COBASEN, an IoT search engine to address the research challenge regarding the discovery and selection of IoT devices when large number of devices with overlapping and sometimes redundant functionality are available in IoT middleware systems, and DMS, a rule-based reasoner engine allowing to set up computational analytics on device data when it is still in motion, extracting valuable information from it for automated decision making. DMS uses Complex Event Processing to analyze and react over streaming data, allowing for example, to trigger an actuator when a specific error or condition appears in the stream. The main goal of this work is to highlight the importance of a decision support system for decision analytics in the IoT paradigm. We developed a system which implements DMS concepts. However, for preliminarily tests, we made a functional evaluation of both systems in terms of performance. Our initial findings suggest that the Decision Support IoT Framework provides important approaches that facilitate the development of IoT applications, and provides a new way to see how the business rules and decision-making will be made towards the Internet of Things.

Even though agile actively seeks collaboration from all its stakeholders, most agile projects do not extend themselves toward the operations people. To solve this problem, DevOps is introduced. DevOps is a conceptual framework for reintegrating development and operations of Information Systems, which is able to break the wall between developers and operations professionals. DevOps improves the work through a collection of principles and practices, centered around close collaboration between Development and Operations personnel. However, both sides have paid little attention to issues faced by each other. Communication gaps is a recurrent problem in agile teams that is also eminent in the relationship between developers and operations. Literature offers little research on this aspect of communication in DevOps. This position paper describes the communication practices from a distributed agile team composed of developers and operations based on communication challenges (geographical, socio-cultural, and temporal distance) and strategies (frequency, direction, modality, and content). From the results we outline possible research focus for future work, aiming to enrich the academia research on the matter as well as to help practitioners to improve their working practices.

This paper presents a preliminary communication maturity model named C2M. The C2M model aims to help organizations to identify the maturity of communication-related aspects and processes providing a tool to reveal what practices need to be improved. The model is composed of three maturity areas respectively organized into factors, goals, and practices. It has been preliminarily evaluated in two steps. First, two focus group meetings were conducted in two organizations aiming to identify how fit the model is to attend its purpose. Second, a diagnosis activity was conducted in two organizations aiming to observe how the model is perceived when used in practice. The experts who participated in the diagnosis activity reported that the application of the model allowed them to become aware of communication issues their teams were facing that they had no knowledge of. Their positive feedback is an initial indication that the model is fit to point out the maturity of communication processes and practices in distributed software projects.

Software Crowdsourcing (SW CS) is an emerging area in Software Engineering (SE). It has a dynamic nature in which problems are opened up to crowds of people through an open call to solve problems with the incentive of prizes for the best solutions. Although SW CS has been increasingly adopted in the software industry, many open issues are still to be elucidated. For instance, collaboration aspects are one of those issues. They impact communication and coordination practices. This study aims to identify barriers to collaboration in SW CS and communication practices that might help overcome these barriers. We identified the barriers and practices from a qualitative data analysis study considering an available literature review report. Our study contributes to the SE area by providing insights for researchers, tool designers, and managers that might help them to better understand collaboration issues and proposed solutions to solve them.

During the past few years, with the fast development and proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT), many application areas have started to exploit this new computing paradigm. An interesting use of IoT is in the Industrial field, which has resulted in a new business concept called IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things). Another important fact is the number of active computing devices has been growing at a rapid pace in IoT environments around the world. Consequently, a mechanism to deal with this different devices has become necessary. Middleware systems solutions for IoT have been developed in both research and industrial environments to supply this need. However, discover, search, select, and interact with devices remain a critical challenge. In this paper we present COBASEN, a software framework composed of a Context Module and a Search Engine to address the research challenge regarding the discovery and interaction with IoT devices when large number of devices with overlapping and sometimes redundant functionality are available in IoT middleware systems. The search engine of the COBASEN operates based on the semantic characteristics of the devices, which is provided by the context module, and that helps users in their interactions with desired devices. The main goal of this work is to highlight the importance of a context-based search engine in the IoT paradigm and to provide a solution that addresses the proper management of search and usage in IoT middleware environments. We developed a tool that implements all COBASEN concepts. However, for preliminarily tests, we made a functional evaluation of the search engine in terms of performance for indexing and querying response time. Our initial findings suggest that COBASEN provides important approaches that facilitate the development of IIoT applications, which based on the COBASEN systems support, may perform essential roles to improve industrial processes.

In the last years a new computing paradigm called Internet of Things (IoT) has been gaining more attention. This paradigm has become popular by embedding mobile network and processing capability into a wide range of physical computing devices used in everyday life of many people. An important part that composes the IoT is the middleware, which is a system that abstracts the management of physical devices and provides services based on the information of these devices. Context-aware is an important feature of IoT middleware systems. This feature allows to discover, understand, and store relevant information related to devices and their respective events. In this sense, this work aims to present an ongoing system that has been developed to provide services of contextualized information about IoT devices in heterogeneous environments.

Distributed Software Development (DSD) has been discussed by industry and academia for almost two decades now, and, as consequence, there is a large number of empirical scientific papers and industrial reports on it. However, the description of the context in which the empirical study was conducted is not always clear or complete, making the process of searching for empirical evidence burdensome. It becomes difficult to understand or to judge the relevance of study given that DSD scenarios are diverse. What works in one context might not apply to another. To reduce such difficulty, we need, as a research community, to have means to standardize how we report empirical studies and their findings aiming to make them more readily available to practitioners and researchers. In this paper we present an extended taxonomy to classify empirical DSD evidence. We conducted an expert opinion survey with researchers and practitioners to identify elements to compose the taxonomy. Preliminary evaluation of the proposed taxonomy suggests that it can be used to synthesize existing knowledge, to identify gaps in literature, to identify related work and to help researchers who will publish or review further empirical work, as well as practitioners who are interested in published empirical studies.

A Use Case Model is composed of use cases that describe software functionalities through Use Case Specifications. The evaluation of the specifications that compose such a model can allow for an early identification of usability defects. We previously proposed MIT 1-Model Inspection Technique for Usability Evaluation that aims to support the identification of usability defects through the evaluation of use cases specifications. In this paper, we present the evaluation of this technique through a controlled experiment that measured its efficiency, effectiveness, perceived ease of use, and perceived usefulness when compared to the Use Case Evaluation (UCE) method. Our quantitative findings indicate that MIT 1 allows users to find more usability defects in less time than UCE. However, UCE was considered easiest to use and more useful than MIT 1, highlighting improvement needs for MIT 1.

Context: To software architects (SAs), the quality requirements (QRs) to a software system are key to designing the software architecture. However, understanding SAs' roles in the QRs engineering activities only recently became a topic in empirical requirements engineering research and very little is still known about QRs engineering from SAs' in large and distributed projects. Goal: This exploratory study aims at explicating how SAs are involved in engineering QRs in a specific distributed development setting, namely in organizations that distribute software development activities to closely located business units, known as near-shore development centres (NDCs), and in a specific geographic zone, namely Eastern Europe. Method: Based on interviews with 16 practitioners working on large projects in NDCs, we explicate the participation and involvement of NDCs' architects in QRs tasks. Results: We found that SAs from NDCs (i) are actively involved in QRs documentation and validation, (ii) are relatively passive participants in QRs elicitation and prioritization, and (iii) are not at all involved in QRs negotiation. Perhaps, our most surprising finding is that NDCs may often have economic incentives to misalign with onshore QRs practices. Conclusions: We explicated QRs practices, compared them to previously published ones, and found implications for both researchers and practitioners. Though, our results are preliminary, as they are from an exploratory study.

Trust is an integral element of any collaboration. We sought to investigate the interplay among trust, risk, and reliance within the context of Global Systems Engineering (GSE) teams. To this end, we conducted an empirical study of individuals' processes and considerations when presented with hypothetical scenarios that required long-term and short-term commitments, in addition to relinquishing control to others in their team. In this paper, we present the results of our 1-1 interviews of 57 individuals collaborating in GSE teams within five organizations. Our results suggest that study participants often readily trust their peers and those higher in the organizational hierarchy when no long-term commitment is required, and the participant retains control of the scenario. Our study findings also suggest that this finding does not necessarily extend to scenarios in which their decision entailed loss of control and thus higher risk and reliance. Our investigation of an individual's decision-making processes and the influence of trust on these processes provide us with insights that can be used to refine GSE managers' strategies and guide future research.

Trust remains a challenge in globally distributed development teams. In order to investigate how trust plays out in this context, we conducted a qualitative study of 5 multi-national IT organizations. We interviewed 58 individuals across 10 countries and made two principal findings. First, study participants described trust in terms of their expectations of their colleagues. These expectations fell into one of three dimensions: that socially correct behavior will persist, that team members possess technical competency, and that individuals will demonstrate concern for others. Second, our study participants described trust as a dynamic process, with phases including formation, dissolution, adjustment and restoration. We provide new insights into these dimensions and phases of trust within distributed teams which extend existing literature. Our study also provides guidelines on effective practices within distributed teams in addition to providing implications for the extension of software engineering and collaboration tools.

Trust is generally considered a key element of effective and productive distributed team collaborations. In this paper, we report the results of our investigation into the factors that engender trust in Global Systems Engineering (GSE) teams in five multinational organizations. We extend our previous work by conducting a new field study focused solely on factors that engender trust and identify the implications of these factors. Our work provides significant contributions to practitioners, researchers and tool developers. Managers working in study field sites have confirmed that our findings will be used to inform future team management strategies. Our results can also be used to structure and guide future research in this field, as it identifies gaps in existing literature. Finally, our findings can be used to inform the development of future tools that aim to support collaborative work in general and GSE teams specifically.

An adequate task allocation plan is an effective strategy to reduce collaboration issues in distributed software development. Practitioners adopt distinct processes to allocate tasks as well as diverse labels for the same activities and artifacts. This diversity is also found in literature. Task allocation proposals consider different elements and use distinct names for the same concepts. The lack of a standardized vocabulary and of an understanding of the elements involved impairs knowledge acquisition and sharing. Our paper presents a domain ontology to represent concepts related to task allocation in distributed teams. The ontology was defined based on a literature systematic mapping and on the opinion of experts. Preliminary evaluation suggests that the relationships among concepts are valid in real projects. The ontology brings awareness to managers regarding the factors related to task allocation planning and provides researchers with a framework to define processes and design tools to support such activity.

Software projects involve diverse roles and artifacts that have dependencies to requirements. Project team members in different roles need to coordinate but their coordination is affected by the availability of domain knowledge, which is distributed among different project members, and organizational structures that control cross-functional communication. Our study examines how information flowed between different roles in two software projects that had contrasting distributions of domain knowledge and different communication structures. Using observations, interviews, and surveys, we examined how diverse roles working on requirements and their related artifacts coordinated along task dependencies. We found that communication only partially matched task dependencies and that team members that are boundary spanners have extensive domain knowledge and hold key positions in the control structure. These findings have implications on how organizational structures interfere with task assignments and influence communication in the project, suggesting how practitioners can adjust team configuration and communication structures.

We sought to understand the role that Web 2.0 technologies play in supporting the development of trust in globally distributed development teams. We found the use of Web 2.0 technologies to be minimal, with less than 25% of our participants reporting using them and many reporting the disadvantages of adopting them. In response, we sought to understand the factors that led to the use and non-use of these technologies in distributed development teams. We adopted a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze data collected from 61 interviewees representing all common roles in systems development. We discovered six factors that influenced the use and non-use of Web 2.0 technology. We present a proclivity model to frame our findings as well as our conclusions about the interrelationships between the results of our qualitative and quantitative analyses. We also present implications for the design of collaboration tools, which could lead to greater support and usage by distributed developers.

Distribution of development processes has become common as a side effect of globalization. Working in a distributed setting brings challenges inherent to distance. The Software Engineering community has been investigating these challenges for over a decade, and issues regarding communication, coordination, and trust are frequently reported in literature. However, a few studies discuss solutions for these challenges. Frequently, best practices are described in a general context. In this paper we report our findings from a systematic literature review that aimed at identifying reported challenges and the proposed solutions to solve such challenges. In a time that distributed development has established its roots, it is important to move towards solutions to well-known problems. Our report aims to establish a baseline of problems that still need solutions. This baseline brings awareness to the global software engineering community. We finish discussing the implications for furthering the body of knowledge in the field.

Distributed Software Development (DSD) is characterized by physical distance and/or different time-zones among those involved in the process of developing software. This physical and temporal separation entails some advantages, but it also brings challenges related to communication, coordination and cooperation in carrying out complex software development tasks. Cultural and time-zone differences, lack of standardized processes, tools and infrastructure incompatibility are examples of such challenges. Communication is among one of the main challenges faced by distributed teams. Therefore, this study aims at moving towards a consolidated knowledge about communication in distributed projects by developing a better understanding of which factors influence communication processes and which are the reported effects of this influence in DSD projects. To attend our goal, we conducted a systematic tertiary literature review of communication in distributed projects. The research questions that guided our study are: Q.1 Which factors influence communication in Distributed Software Development projects?; Q.2 Which are the effects of these factors in communication in Distributed Software Development projects?; and Q.3 Which factors identified in Q.1 are related to the effects identified in Q.2 in Distributed Software Development projects? We briefly present below the result of the identification, analysis, and synthesis of the effects of communication process in DSD projects and the factors in the distributed context that affect communication effectiveness.

Requirements engineering involves collaboration among many project team members. Driven by coordination needs, this collaboration relies on communication and knowledge that members have of their colleagues and related activities. Ineffective coordination with those who work on requirements dependencies may result in project failure. In this paper, we report on a study of roles and communication structures in the collaboration driven by interdependent requirements in a software team. Through on-site observations, interviews with the developers and application of social network analysis, we found that there was significant communication between diverse roles in the project, and identified what were the reasons for communication between the different roles. We also found that these interactions typically involved a core of requirements analysts and testers in close communication, that most often they involved critical members whose absence, whether temporary or permanent, would disrupt the information flow if removed from the project, as well as that new hires were mostly isolated from the team collaboration. Most interestingly we found that the emergent communication structure between the different roles in the project did not conform to the planned communication structure prescribed by the organization. These findings further our knowledge about collaboration driven by requirements, and provide some useful implications for research and development of collaborative tools to support the effective coordination of cross-functional teams in software development.

Successful distributed collaboration requires support for informal communication, opportunistic interactions, and smooth and frequent shifts between synchronous and asynchronous collaboration modes. Introducing new collaboration tools for distributed interaction is often regarded as a difficult organizational endeavor, compounded by a lack of concrete, empirical evidence of expected improvements in tool-supported distributed collaboration. In this paper, we describe the introduction of the Microsoft Office Communication Server collaboration tool to improve collaboration in a distributed project at Siemens IT Solutions and Services. Improvements included (1) faster response and resolution time on issues that involve cross-site communication; (2) enhanced productivity of global teams, enhanced sense of teamwork, and motivation in the global team; and (3) flatter communication structures across sites. We discuss lessons learned from the adoption of the collaboration tool and factors that made it possible.

Requirements interdependencies create technical dependencies among project members that generally belong to different functional groups in an organization, but who need to coordinate activities during processes of requirements change management. Effective knowledge management is needed to disseminate information on requirement changes across teams working on interdependent requirements to avoid mis-interpretations. Social networks are regarded as important in fostering knowledge management, where brokers or gatekeepers have the role of project members facilitating information flow. However, little is known about processes of information flow and brokerage in social networks built around interdependent requirements. In a field study of requirement interdependencies in a large IT manufacturing organization, we found that brokers holding pockets of knowledge have an impact on information flow in requirement-interdependent teams. We discuss a number of patterns of information flow and draw implications for processes of requirements change management.

Because of intense collaborative needs, requirements engineering is a challenge in global software development. How do distributed teams manage the development of requirements in environments that require significant cross-site collaboration and coordination? In this paper, we report research that used social network analysis to explore collaboration and awareness among team members during requirements management in an industrial distributed software team. Using the lens of a requirements-centred social network to group team members who work on a particular requirement, we collected data to characterize requirements-centric collaborations in a project, and to examine aspects of awareness of requirements changes within these networks. Our findings indicate organic patterns of collaboration involving considerable cross-site interaction, in which communication of changes was the most predominant reason for interaction. Although we did not find evidence that distance affects developers' awareness of remote team members who work on the same requirements, distance affected how accessible the remote colleagues were. We discuss implications for knowledge sharing and coordination of work on a requirement in distributed teams, and propose directions for the design of collaboration tools that support awareness in distributed requirements management.

Project collaborators in a software development project need to stay aware not only of changes to requirements and other artifacts, but also of each other's current work. The set of team members working on a requirement is dynamic, and team members who were not assigned to the requirement in the plan may be involved. If this requirement changes, those team members who are dependent on that requirement must be notified quickly before they do outdated work. However, project plans often do not provide an easy method of listing all of the emergent team members who should be notified of changes to a requirement. We propose a requirements-dependency diagram that displays interdependent requirements and team members who are assigned to these interdependent requirements. The visualization highlights prominent collaborators, lists each collaborator and each requirement only once, marks emergent collaborators, and is simple and clutter-free. By viewing this diagram, collaborators will know who to contact to notify others of changes to requirements, and can contact experts working on interrelated requirements.

The purpose of this paper is to present the MuNDDoS Research Group, located at PUCRS University, in Porto Alegre, Brazil. This group was created in 2001, and since then is conducting several research projects on Global Software Development in Brazil, collaborating with research groups from other universities in Brazil and other countries. We present the research group goals, some of the projects developed, and the current projects.