Quality Assessment of Awareness Support in Agile Collaborative Tools

Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) is a research field focused on understanding characteristics of interdependent group work with the objective of designing adequate computer-based technology to support cooperative work processes. One of the key concepts of CSCW is the provision of relevant information to workers in a team, a concept named awareness. As the market and research community have already perceived the importance of providing fast and reliable information among team workers, it shares the interest of CSCW in awareness improvement. This addresses the following research question: What is the quality of awareness support in agile collaborative tools? To answer this question a survey was performed with 200 users which provided feedback scores for each given design element related to support of different awareness aspects. We used a Formal Technical Review (FTR) method specifically focused on awareness assessment, named Awareness Checklist. According to this method, there are 54 design elements that influence or contribute to awareness support. Those elements can be categorized in 14 design categories, which are directly related to six awareness types: Collaborations, Location, Context, Social, Workspace and Situation. We found that Microsoft Team Foundation Server, Jira and Trello offer more collaborative aware support, however about localization and context the DotProject tool obtained the highest score, as well in Social and the Situation too. The results offer the opportunity to assess the quality of awareness in any collaborative software used in small or bigger business projects and can be used to demonstrate certain aspects of the software which can be improved to achieve their user's satisfaction. The same concept can also be used to outline the tools main advantages and disadvantages, acting as a quality reviewer that can help to choose which collaborative tools should be adopted according to categories strengths and weaknesses.