Supporting Expertise Communication In Developer-Centered Collaborative Software Development Environments

Looking at software development as a collective knowledge activity has changed the view of the role of communication in software development from something to be eliminated to something to be nurtured. Developer-centered collaborative software development environments (CSDEs) should facilitate software development in such a way, as individual software developers collaboratively develop information artifacts through social interactions. In this chapter, we identify two distinctive types of communication in software development, coordination communication and expertise communication, and argue that different sets of design guidelines are necessary in supporting each type of communication. We then describe nine design guidelines to support expertise communication based on the theories of social capital and models of supporting collective creativity.