Shared waypoints and social tagging to support collaboration in software development

Abstract

This paper presents the conceptual design of TagSEA, a collaborative tool to support asynchronous software development. Our goal is to develop a lightweight source code annotation tool that enhances navigation, coordination, and capture of knowledge relevant to a software development team. Our design is inspired by combining "waypoints" from geographical navigation with "social tagging" from social bookmarking software to support coordination and communication among software developers. We describe the motivation behind this work, walk through the design and implementation, and report early feedback on how this lightweight tool supports collaborative software engineering activities. Finally, we suggest a number of new research directions that this topic exposes.