Supporting Trust through Continuous Coordination (slides:) Ban Al-Ani Project Scientist, UC Irvine/ICS Co-Author: David Redmiles Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences University of California, Irvine

Abstract

We report our investigation of the intersection of two areas: trust in distributed development teams and the role that software tools can play in the support of teams. We report the findings of a field study we performed as well as the conclusions we derived from an extensive review of the literature concerning trust in teams. These findings are collectively used as a means to investigate the role that software tools play in promoting trust. Specifically we review tools that were developed based on the Continuous Coordination (CC) paradigm that we developed in support of distributed development. Our investigation led us to conclude that these tools (Palantír, Ariadne, World View, and Workspace Activity Viewer) do play a role, primarily by sharing information across boundaries, through visualizations, and in other ways relevant to tool characteristics and related to their visualizations. Our analysis provides insights into the role existing tools play in developing trust and can also provide insights on how future tools can be designed to promote trust in distributed teams.

 

Bio

Ban Al-Ani is a project scientist at UCI ICS. Her research interests focus on social aspects of collaborations, distributed collaboration, requirements engineering and IT education. At UCI, she works with David Redmiles exploring the social and global aspects of software engineering, with Andre van der Hoek on developing means to augment existing software engineering environments, and with Gloria Mark on investigating technology use in disrupted environments projects she initiated.