Gossip: an awareness engine for increasing product awareness in distributed development projects

摘要

More and more product development projects involve geographically distributed groups of developers. One problem in such groups is the long term lack of awareness of the activities in remote sites. In this paper we discuss the importance of awareness in distributed product development projects. We argue that generic services are needed in development environments for providing continuous awareness of remote sites. We introduce a product awareness model that puts focus on a shared composite product and the propagation of awareness in it. We describe the design and implementation of this awareness model in form of an awareness engine called Gossip.