An Architecture to Support Learning, Awareness, and Transparency in Social Software Engineering

Introduction Traditional clichés about software developers lose their validity more and more. Times, when programmers sat in dark cellars and tried to solve all problems on their own are over once and for all. In the meantime software engineering has become a very knowledge-intensive [5] and communicative process (not only but also triggered by agile methods for software development) where the actors heavily exchange data (see Google-Code), connect with like-minded (see Google Summer of Code), blog about experiences in their own weblogs, provide code snippets free of charge (see Django-Snippets) or help novices with words and deeds in large mailing lists. is social software engineering-the creation of software and related artifacts within a social network-gained a lot of attention in recent software engineering research [1,17]. Besides the improvements of integrated development environments (IDE, e.g. Eclipse) or procedure models (e.g. eXtreme Programming [3]) research is addressing improvements of the daily working and learning environments of the developers. e main function of collaborative development environments (CDE) [2] is to support the whole development process of a team of software developers from start to nish. is includes version control of code artifacts as well as process documentation, coordination of tasks or support for division of labour.