Supporting Pervasive Awareness in GSD Projects

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This blog post’s title is taken from Antonio Lagrotteria’s Masters thesis project, which he completed under my supervision over the last six months. Today, he submitted the thesis for examination and will be flying to his homeland for much needed R&R :-) No doubt, he worked quite hard and produced a very good piece of research and prototype. The work was carried out in close collaboration with TEO.
The main idea of this project was motivated by my initial discussion with TEO’s Zahid and Ali as they had observed certain challenges to support awareness and communication in their Globally Distributed Software Development teams. The main goal of Antonio’s thesis was to design, implement and evaluate a system for pervasive awareness in GSD projects. However, the first task in this project was to gain an in-depth understanding of a distributed team members’ awareness about the activities and their working contexts in order to address some of the communication challenges.

The research for this project was carried out by applying multi-method approach as it involved qualitative studies using face-to-face interviews, experimental development of prototype tool, and evaluation of the tool with potential user. This work has produced an initial framework for providing an integrated infrastructure to support pervasive awareness in GSD projects. Antonio’s thesis will be out soon after the examination and it would be an interesting reading for those who are involved in GSD projects and teams. Both Antonio and I are interested in publishing this piece of work through a peer-review venue and he intends to start working on this after his return from vacations. I also plan to continue this line of research for not only maturing the concepts and framework developed so far but also extending the theoretical concepts underpinning the framework and technological infrastructure for real-life projects. If you are interested in doing a Masters or PhD research in this area, I’ll be happy to work with you to define an interesting and challenging R&D project in this area.