Requirements for an infrastructure to support activity-based computing in global software development

Abstract

Global Software Development (GSD) has become an established paradigm of developing software. One of the most important prerequisites of successfully supporting GSD projects is the provision of appropriate tooling support. Researchers and practitioners have developed several dozens of tools to support the GSD paradigm. However, there has been an increased realization that the most commonly used desktop metaphor underpinning existing tools has several limitations in terms of supporting communication, coordination, collaboration and awareness among distributed team members. We propose to leverage the Activity-Based Computing (ABC) paradigm that has been successfully applied to support collaboration and mobility in healthcare environments. We are exploring the viability of leveraging the ABC paradigm for addressing many of the limitations of the existing GSD tools. This paper identifies the requirements that an ABC based infrastructure needs to fulfill to support GSD practitioners. We have extensively reviewed the literature reporting requirements for designing GSD tools and have categorized them in two distinct groups: system quality requirements and system requirements for computer-mediated teamwork. We have analyzed the identified requirements with respect to the ABC principles using a scenario to demonstrate how the requirements reported in the literature and the ABC principles can provide a synergistic foundation for guiding the development of an infrastructure enabling GSD tools to take advantage of the ABC paradigm. We expect these requirements to be used not only by us to develop an infrastructure but also by others to develop or modify GSD tools.