Empirical Study of Ad Hoc Collaborative Activities in Software Engineering

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.