Empirical Study of Ad Hoc Collaborative Activities in Software Engineering

Abstract

This paper presents empirical research on ad hoc collaborative activities found in an industrial software engineering setting. We believe that a better understanding of these activities and their content will help us to propose software development process enhancements and also provide some insight into the tools needed to support communications in a distributed software development environment. Further details of our motivations are included, followed by a discussion on our research methodology, and, finally, some results of a preliminary analysis confirming the significance of our data and the importance of the observed phenomenon.