Sysiphus: Enabling informal collaboration in global software development

Abstract

In global software projects, informal communication across sites is severely hampered, making it difficult to disseminate implicit knowledge. Participants have a partial view of the overall organization, do not have access to the complete rationale behind decisions, and when changes arise, participants from other sites are surprised. Consequently, issues that could be clarified almost immediately require days until the relevant stakeholders are identified, the issues are understood, and a resolution is agreed upon. We focus on the specific problem of externalizing issues with their context, stakeholders, and organizational roles in distributed settings. The challenge is to capture sufficient knowledge as a side effect of development, while structuring it for long-term use. We describe Sysiphus, a distributed environment providing a uniform framework for system models, collaboration artifacts, and organizational models. Sysiphus encourages participants to make communication and issues explicit in the context of system models and become aware of relevant stakeholders