Abstract Occupational stress refers to job‐related uneasiness and anxiety, which affect people's emotional or physical health. Although occupational stress has been studied in several industries, it has remained largely unexplored in software developers, particularly in emerging economies such as Mexico. In this work, we propose a set of measures for supporting the assessment of occupational stress in software developers, which concurs with the types of tasks performed by software developers daily. For this, we first identified several stressors found in the literature. Then, we carried out 10 semi‐structured interviews with novice software developers to further understand stressors at the workplace. Afterwards, we conducted a study with 30 novice software developers for associating stress with workplace measures. From our work, we identified the workload, mental work fatigue, and work distraction as relevant measures associated with a certain level of stress in software developers. Our results suggest that some indicators can be used to monitor measures that are associated with occupational stress in software developers.

Software Development is a complex process, in which every software product is a knowledge representation of all the involved people. In agile software development, knowledge is prone to vaporise, because documentation is not a priority as indicated in the agile manifesto. This condition generates problems such as poor understanding of the requirements, knowledge transfer deficiency among developers, time wasted by developers while searching for knowledge. The objective of this work is to reduce architectural knowledge vaporisation by means of knowledge condensation to support expertise location (high‐level knowledge at a given time). This through an ontology that will condensate the knowledge in the code phase. This study presents the description of an ontology development process following the Methontology Framework. Results show that the proposed ontology does not present incongruence or inconsistency and answers the competency questions correctly. The main contribution of this study is the ontology which brings several benefits such as a shared concept of the knowledge in the code phase and a way to link the artefacts (resources used by developers in the project) and the experts (artefacts provider).

An important challenge in Agile Global Software Development (AGSD) is architectural knowledge vaporization, i.e., the loss of technical knowledge due to a lack of documentation. In a previous work we identified that technical knowledge is usually available in unstructured textual electronic means (e.g. chat, mail, blogs, etc. - also known as UTEMs) used by AGSD workers during development, although not necessarily easily accessible. Also, we proposed the concept of Knowledge Condensation as a means to recover knowledge from UTEMs, by introducing a structure to their contents along with means to retrieve knowledge. In this work we present our first step towards a Knowledge Condensation tool, through a prototype tagging mechanism to structure architectural knowledge during UTEM interactions. We evaluated the prototype and obtained the following results: (1) a high perception of usefulness and a high projected intention of use, and (2) the identification of 6 tagging behavior profiles from participants. These tagging behaviors can be grouped as (i) participants who tag as expected, (ii) participants who tag more than expected, and (ii) participants who tag less than expected. These results suggest that it is important to cope with "little or no tagging" and "excessive tagging" behaviors to implement knowledge condensation based on UTEM tagging. Furthermore, we identified that tagging could be a good option to structure UTEM interactions, and to retrieve architectural knowledge from UTEM logs. Future work includes improving the tagging mechanism prototype based on the participants' suggestions and overall evaluation results, and implementing a searcher prototype to further evaluate the concept of knowledge condensation based on tagging of UTEM interactions.

Nowadays, the use of agile methodologies (AM) in Global Software Development (GSD) -- known as AGSD -- is increasingly common. However, AM and GSD are not completely compatible. On the one hand, in AM people interactions (face-to-face) are preferred over document-based communications to share knowledge. On the other hand, in GSD knowledge sharing is conducted through documents to minimize the effect of the inherent four distances (physical, temporal, language and cultural). This means that tacit knowledge is preferred in AM and explicit knowledge is preferred in GSD. These differences between AM and GSD affect many aspects of software development, for instance: Architectural Knowledge Management. According to the literature, in AGSD it is preferred to convey Architectural Knowledge (AK) by frequent interactions across sites through unstructured and textual electronic media (UTEM) (chats, emails, forums, etc.), that is, AK is articulated in these media. UTEM leave a textual record of the transmitted information, thus leaving an unstructured log of the shared AK of the project. In this paper we present an empirical study to understand AK articulation in UTEM in AGSD teams. Our results consist of an ontology that represents the involved aspects in AK articulation in UTEM in AGSD teams. Additionally, we identified eleven categories of interactions across sites through UTEM, where requirements and coding themes are prominent. Finally, we found that AK in UTEM is perceived as important, regardless the interaction frequency. These results lead us to think that a tool to structure and exploit AK in UTEM is needed in AGSD, in order to bridge the gap between AM and GSD.

Agile Software Development (ASD) is increasingly common in globally distributed teams -- it is known as AGSD. However, while in ASD face-to-face interactions are preferred over document-based communications, in global software development document-based communication is preferred. These differences affect Architectural Knowledge Management. AGSD workers preferably convey architectural knowledge (AK) by frequent interactions across sites through unstructured and textual electronic media (UTEM) (chats, emails, forums, etc.), i.e., AK is articulated in these media. UTEM leave unstructured logs of shared AK. We present an empirical study to understand AK articulation through UTEM in AGSD teams. Our results are an ontological model about AK articulation through UTEM in AGSD teams, and 11 categories of UTEM interactions across sites, where requirements and coding themes were prominent. Also, we found that AK in UTEM is perceived as important, regardless of the interaction frequency.

One of the current approaches to software engineering is Component-based Software Engineering (CBSE). As its name implies, CBSE has to do with the development of open and distributed systems by assembling a set of components. However in practice it is difficult to follow the characteristics demanded by this working philosophy because when developers want to update or modify a component, they do not have the required and sufficient information to determine the degree of impact that a change will have. In order to understand the management of components in CBSE ten experts in software development were interviewed. With the information obtained, the requirements for a system that we call Component Presence Notifier were defined. This system supports the extraction of information from different repositories of the organization and presents it as elements of a graphical user interface (GUI). This information is provided to the developer while working with any of the registered components in order to increase his/her awareness of the impact of the proposed modification. As future work, this prototype will be evaluated for usability by a group of distributed software developers.

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.

One important tendency in software development has been the globalization of its industry. Software developers are frequently required to work in groups which are distributed throughout multiple geographic locations. People and processes (e.g. software design) are consequently distributed. Providing the support that will allow distributed software developers to collaborate at a convenient moment, is therefore extremely complicated both for the person making contact and the person being contacted. We therefore propose a characterization and a model of collaborative working spheres (CWS) through which to understand the management of activities in distributed software development (DSD). Our work first aims to characterize DSD activities mainly through a survey of literature. We then describe a projected scenario to illustrate how DSD activities can be supported by technology and finally we propose a characterization of CWS through which to represent how DSD workers can collaborate at a moment which is suitable for all involved participants.