Survey of communication and awareness as the most relevant socio-technical aspects of requirements-driven collaboration among software development teams

Requirements engineering is a social process and while working together, stakeholders develop socio-technical relationships. Socio-technical aspects such as communication (information exchange among members) and awareness (knowledge of others) were discussed in literature, but little is known with respect to their role in requirements engineering activities. Therefore, requirements-driven collaboration (RDC), particularly on the relevance of socio-technical aspects, warrants further investigation. The authors aim to fill this gap by conducting a systematic literature review on these two aspects. This review covers planning (defining objectives and search strategy), execution (study search and selection), and interpretation of the findings (results and discussions). Findings revealed more studies on communication than on awareness. Two aspects of communication covered for RDC in literature are: (i) preferred communication medium, and (ii) communication patterns of teams. However, for awareness the aspects affecting awareness and vice versa were studied for RDC. Further investigation indicated the interdependence of awareness and communication and that distance does not affect team's awareness. The authors discuss implications for software practitioners in terms of enhancing their performance by considering the role of information brokers, and identifying central and emergent members etc. Researchers can strengthen the domain by providing more empirical results on interdependence of socio-technical aspects.