A noise blocking methodology for effective collaboration

Abstract

Collaboration relies on efficient communication among developers. Many development teams use instant messaging owing to its synchronous and real-time nature. Despite the convenience provided by instant messaging, developers spend a great amount of time on handling information and task interruption. Consequently, productivity of developers and effectiveness of collaboration are declined. To address the issue, this work introduces an aggressive methodology of noise blocking. The methodology appropriately prioritizes messages based on collaboration requirements. A message which is not urgent for developers to collaborate with others is defined as noise, and such message is blocked to stop unnecessary interruption. To evaluate the proposed methodology, this work conducts experiments on datasets collected from real-world projects. Then, a noise analysis tool—message analyzer for instant notification of information (MINI)—is implemented. The evaluation results show that noise hinders collaboration significantly because almost half of messages are noise. When MINI is applied, more than 80% of noise is identified, and at most 91.6% of time wasted in noise for the whole team is saved. The proposed noise blocking methodology shows promising results.