Supporting the Software Development Process Using Social Media: Experiences with Student Projects

Traditionally, teamwork faces problems related with communication and coordination in both local and distributed environments; software development is not an exception. Some of the most significant problems in communication are the lack of reciprocity and fast response, especially in distributed environments. Communication should be motivated and maintained through the project development. Early media such as e-mail and forums do not possess such source of motivation and synchronization. New media such as Facebook and G+ have such elements that motivate team members, especially young developers, to remain online facilitating the communication just in time. In this paper we present some experiences using the most popular social media such as Facebook, G+, Skype, and Dropbox in developing software projects. Our study presents statistics of what kinds of communication and coordination issues are properly implemented using Facebook. Based on this, we present an initial set of metrics to assess how communication, coordination and knowledge sharing are implemented in these kinds of distributed environments.