Capturing communication and context in the software project lifecycle

Abstract

Capturing design process knowledge is a complex multidisciplinary problem. The advent and increased acceptance of digital computer-supported cooperative work tools enabled us to study how engineering collaboration might be captured and achieved to support engineering lifecycle activities. To improved project communications among software engineers and create structured e-mail archives, we developed an environmental called CodeLink. CodeLink is a design rationale support tool, integrating e-mail-based collaboration with the software development process, providing teams of developers with a means to automatically associate specific code elements with e-mail messages. In this paper we describe Code-Link's architecture, user interface, and the results of an informal user study. We believe that by integrating collaborative work tools with development tools, we can enrich the communication within engineering teams and build repositories that detail collaborative decisions made in the development process. These repositories can then be used to facilitate software maintenance and extract design rationale.