Incorporating Social Software into Distributed Agile Development
Environments
Fabio Abbattista, Fabio Calefato, Domenico Gendarmi, Filippo Lanubile
Università degli Studi di Bari, Dipartimento di Informatica
{fabio, calefato, gendarmi, lanubile}@di.uniba.it
Abstract
The use of social software applications, such as wikis
and blogs, has emerged as a practical and economical
option to consider as global teams may use them to
organize, track, publish their work, and then, share
knowledge. We intend to push further the application
of social software principles and technologies into
collaborative development environments for agile and
distributed projects. As a first step, in this paper we
first present a survey of social software, as well as
tools and environments for collaborative development.
Then, we present some opportunities and challenges of
incorporating social software aspects in agile
distributed development.
1. Introduction
Distributed software teams are characterized by
geographical, temporal, and sociocultural distance,
each having an impact on all the forms of cooperation
within teams, that is, communication, collaboration
and coordination [1],[7]. While distance exacerbates
the importance of human-centered aspects related to
collaboration in distributed development, even further
challenges arise when teams apply agile development
methods.
Agile is an iterative and incremental approach to
software development, which is performed in a highly
collaborative manner since its methods are based upon
intense interactions among individuals and thus, they
emphasize the need for frequent informal
communication and collocated teams [2],[17]. In the
last years, while many organizations have adopted the
agile methodology to tackle the challenges of
requirements volatility and shorter time to market,
many others have gone distributed to reduce costs by
moving to offshore development, where much of the
software is implemented in lower-paid countries [21].
Distributed Agile Development [25] aims at getting
together the benefits of both agile and distributed
978-1-4244-2776-5 © 2008 IEEE
software development. However, distributed
development seems opposed to agile as it goes against
the notion of physical proximity, being developers
geographically dispersed by definition, while one of
the fundamental tenets of agile is that the most
efficient and effective method of conveying
information is face-to-face conversation, which must
be emphasized in a single open development space
where the team can work closely together [5].
In fact, blending agility and distribution together is
not as easy as just relaxing the collocation constraint of
agile development. Previous research on distributed
agile development has already acknowledged that
conventional agile methods need to be adjusted in
globally distributed environments to address the
challenges coming up when agility is introduced in a
distributed setting. Recent studies in literature have
provided recommendations for achieving both agility
and distribution, focusing either on how to improve
informal communication and agreement in agile
distributed development scenario [19],[18], or on
strategies and practices to enhance both flexibility and
rigor, thus finding the right balance between agile and
distributed approaches [20],[26]. Recently, besides
classic groupware tools (e.g., email, shared calendars),
other collaborative applications, known as social
software (e.g., blog, wiki), have shown an appealing
ability to overcome typical issues of remote group
interaction, by making easier to communicate,
collaborate, and share knowledge. With this paper we
begin to investigate how incorporating social software
principles and technologies into collaborative
development environments can also improve
communication and knowledge sharing for distributed
teams applying agile methods.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows.
Section 2 presents the challenges of Distributed Agile
Development. Section 3 introduces fundamental
principles and characteristic functionality of the most
popular social software applications. Section 4
presents an overview of software engineering tools for
flexible and distributed development. Finally, Section
46
5 ends up with a discussion on opportunities and
challenges of integrating social software aspects in
agile and distributed development environments.
2. Challenges of Distributed Agile
Development
The fundamental question on whether agile
techniques can be used in a distributed setting is still
open to debate. In fact, agile and distributed
development practices are so different that, if applied
together, the key characteristics of the former would
exacerbate the challenges intrinsic to the latter. For
instance, the need for regular communication, flexible
requirements, and informal agreement of agile
development contrasts with the large intrinsic
reduction of communication, as well as the need for
stable requirements and controlled processes typical of
distributed software development.
We have surveyed the proceedings of the most
recent conferences for which the topic of distributed
agile development is relevant, namely, XP 2008, Agile
2008, and ICGSE 2008. While none of XP 2008
papers focused on distributed agile development, the
Agile 2008 proceedings included a number of
experience reports from practitioners about the
challenges encountered, though with no or limited
effort to generalize lessons learned.
More interestingly, the ICGSE 2008 proceedings
included one case study and two experience report
from Industry (see [9], [25], and [30]), for which Table
1 provides a detailed comparison. It is worth noting
that all these three papers report SCRUM practices
[28] rather than XP [4] as the agile methodology
followed. As Cristal et al. point out [9] while XP
mostly focuses on programming practices, like Test
Driven Development, refactoring, and simple design,
SCRUM is focused on planning, thus helping teams
especially during the transition from plan-driven
methodology.
In addition, like in distributed software studies, most of
the challenges and lessons learned concern
communication issues due to the reduced opportunity
of direct communication between stakeholders.
However Fowler raises an interesting point when
describing his experience with distributed agile
development at ThoughtWorks [12]. Since distance
impairs direct communication, then, to cope with such
reduction, teams applying Distributed Agile
Development must supplement it through indirect
communication, that is, through the exchange of
47
shared artifacts. Thus, although agile development
usually means less documentation, the price to pay for
applying agility and distribution together is to write
more documents to communicate enough.
3. Social software
Social Software is a general term encompassing a
set of tools and applications that enable group
interaction and computer-mediated communication.
Thus, because it has a focus on the creation of online
communities, but not only business-oriented as for
Groupware, Social Software includes everything from
classic email to 3D virtual worlds The same concept is
sometimes expressed as Web 2.0 [24], as it captures
distinctive features and key principles that can be
reduced to:
- Participation, content is created and organized by
common users rather than organizations;
- Interaction, applications available from the Web
provide rich user interfaces as desktop applications;
- Community/collaboration, the more people use
such tools, the better they get, and social network
effects emerge.
However, considering Web 2.0 as a synonym with
Social Software can be misleading because the former
definition comprises only the latest form of Social
Software, excluding old Web 1.0 collaborative
applications, such as chat, forum, and mailing list,
which are social in the sense that they do help building
online communities as well. Nevertheless, these classic
social tools have long found their way in supporting
dispersed teams. Hence, here we intend to focus on
new generation Social Software, for which we report
some key applications in the following.
Blogs. They represent the simplest way for common
users to create a website where content is added in
form of posts displayed in a reverse chronological
order [24]. Compared to traditional personal websites,
the novelty stands in the opportunity for readers to
interactively leave comments that interconnect
different blogs to each other, generating a particular
community or social network of bloggers, called
blogosphere. Among the very many existing uses,
multi-author blogs can be adopted within a software
team for fostering communication among developers
and customers, as a process document, and as a
stepwise history of project evolution.
 Table 1. A comparison of papers on Distributed Agile Development from ICGSE 2008 proceedings.
Study Projects Agile
Challenges Lessons learned
description measurements Methodology
- Videoconference
Distributed issues, both technical
Paasivaara et

- 1 project
Industrial SCRUM w/ (low bandwidth) and
al. [25]

- 2 sites (Norway, Multiple communication mode

case study SCRUM of conversational
Malaysia) are needed
(interviews) SCRUMS (slowness and silence)
- 1,5 year
meetings - Rqmts often
misunderstood
- Dedicated videoconferencing
Sureshandra

equipment
et al. [30]

Industrial - 90 projects
Distributed - Photo-chart of team members at
experience - ? sites (India, …) N.A.
SCRUM each site
report - 3 years
- Transition to distributed agile
should be stepwise
- Communication
Cristal et al. [9]

Distributed issues - Document and share SCRUM

- 2 projects
Industrial SCRUM w/ - Inappropriate team meetings minutes
- 2/3 sites (US,
experience SCRUM of organization and task - Less documentation does not
S.America, Asia)
report SCRUMS assignment mean less valuable docs
- 1+ year
meetings - Lack of rqmts - Adopt global taskboards
documentation

Wikis. They can be regarded as a simple web-based
collaborative authoring system. Unlike blogs, a wiki
may not distinguish among reader and writer, and let
anyone create and edit content in form of wiki pages.
Main wiki features include versioning and document
history, which let users track changes applied to
documents. As shown in [22], a wiki can be
successfully used in the software development process,
because it results as an excellent mean to collect
asynchronous contributions from a group of distributed
people in a centralized repository of textual artifacts.
Collaborative tagging and folksonomies. The
activity of labeling resources of interest is called
tagging, as it consists of attaching one or more tags
(i.e., free keywords) to the resource. While
individually using a tagging system, everyone can see
who else is participating by observing others’ tagging
behaviors. This tight feedback loop makes these
systems social and the result is a collection of
annotations, also called a folksonomy [15]. Nowadays,
different kind of systems have introduced folksonomy-
based approaches for information organization,
however social bookmarking systems like del.icio.us
were the pioneers and made tags so popular, letting
users store, organize (through tags), and share
bookmarks to digital artifacts.
Social networking. Social networking sites support
users in the shaping of a digital identity through the
creation of profiles and networks of contacts [8].
Popular examples include both professional networks,
like Facebook or Linkedin, and unprofessional ones,
such as MySpace. The creation and maintenance of a
personal publicly accessible profile plays a crucial role
as it serves as a testimonial of digital self-presentation,
not only for your existing friends, but also for making
new ones. This is an important incentive for users to
keep their profiles up to date and enlarge their
networks.
Other Social Software. There are other numerous
applications that can be regarded as social software.
Mashup services, for example, combine data and
services from different sites into a single access point,
providing new functionality. By opening up data and
quickly combining different information in new
interesting ways, mashups can effectively exploit the
large amount of user-generated content available
through social software applications.
4. Tool support for collaborative software
development
Tools provide a considerable help to software
engineering activities. In the case of global software
engineering, adequate tool support is paramount to
enable distributed teamwork. Other classifications of
software engineering tools exist in literature. For
instance, Whitehead [32] has recently proposed to
classify tools into four broad categories: 1) model
based – tools that allow the collaborative authoring of
software diagrams; 2) process support – tools
developed to enable collaboration during the

48
development process; 3) awareness – tools that inform
about yours and others’ ongoing tasks; 4) collaborative
infrastructure – tools developed to ease the integration
of various collaborative tools and their data. Here,
instead, we use a simpler categorization, grouping
tools by their main function. Consequently, the most
prominent software engineering tools available to
assist distributed projects may fall into the following
categories:
Software Configuration management. A software
configuration management (SCM) tool includes the
ability to manage change in a controlled manner, by
checking components in and out of a repository, and
the evolution of software products, by storing multiple
versions of components, and producing specified
versions on command. SCM tools also provide a good
way for programmers to share software, making sure
that interdependent files are changed together and
controlling who is allowed to. Further SCM tools make
it possible to save messages about what changed and
why. Open-source SCM tools, such as SVN and its
predecessor CVS, have become indispensable tools for
coordinating the interaction of distributed developers.
Bug and issue tracking. This function is centered on
a database, accessible by all team members through a
web-based interface. Other than an identifier and a
description, a recorded bug includes information about
who found it, the steps to reproduce it, who has been
assigned on it, which releases the bug exists in and it
has been fixed in. Trackers are a generalization of bug
tracking systems to include the management of other
issues, such as feature requests, support requests, or
patches.
Build and release management. It allows projects to
create and schedule, typically through a web interface,
workflows that execute build scripts, compile binaries,
invoke test frameworks, deploy to production systems,
and send email notifications to developers. The larger
the project, the greater the need for automating the
build and release functions. Build tools, such as
CruiseControl and its ancestor, the UNIX make utility,
are essential tools to perform continuous integration,
an agile development practice that allows developers to
integrate daily, thus reducing integration problems.
Product and process modeling. This function
encompasses the core features of Computer Aided
Software Engineering (CASE) tools, from
requirements management to visual modeling of both
software artifacts and processes. Collaboration in
software development tends to be around the creation
of formal or semiformal software artifacts. According
to [32], model-based collaboration is what
distinguishes software engineering collaboration from
49
more general collaboration activities which lack the
focus on using the models to create shared meanings.
Knowledge center. This function is mostly
document-driven and web-enabled, and allows team
members to share explicit knowledge across a work
unit. A knowledge center includes technical references,
standards, frequently asked questions (FAQs) and best
practices.
Communication tools. Software engineers have
adopted a wide range of synchronous and
asynchronous communication technologies for project
use in addition or replacement of communicating face-
to-face by speech. Email is the most-widely used and
successful collaborative application. Thanks to its
flexibility and ease of use, email can support
conversations, but also operate as a task/contact
manager. However, one of the drawbacks of email is
that, due to its success, people tend to use email for a
variety of purposes and often in a quasi-synchronous
manner. In addition, email is ‘socially blind’ [11],
because it does not enable users to signal their
availability. Recently, chat and IM have been
spreading more and more in the workplace because,
unlike email, they are ‘socially translucent’, providing
a lightweight means to ascertain availability of remote
team members and contact them in a timely manner.
Collaborative development environments (CDE).
Sarma describes a pyramidal classification framework
to classify collaboration tools according to the amount
of automated support provided and effort required to
use them [27]. On top of the framework are
Collaborative Development Environments (CDEs),
envisioned by Booch and Brown, who first
acknowledged the need for ‘frictionless surface’ in
development environments [6]. They were motivated
by the observation that much of the developers’ effort
is wasted in switching back and forth between different
applications to communicate and work together.
According to this vision, collaborative features
should be available as components that extend core
applications (e.g., the IDE), thus increasing the users’
comfort and productivity. Therefore, a CDE provides a
project workspace with a standardized toolset to be
used by the global software team. Earliest CDE were
developed within open source software (OSS) projects
because OSS projects, from the beginning, have been
composed of dispersed individuals. Today a number of
CDEs are also available as commercial products or
research prototypes to enable distributed software
development.
SourceForge, from CollabNet, is the most popular
CDE with over 170.000 hosted projects and over
1.800.000 registered users. Its original mission was to
enrich the open source community by providing a
centralized place for developers to control and manage
OSS projects development. SourceForge offers a
variety of free services: web interface for project
administration, trackers, mailing lists and discussion
forums, download notification of new releases, shell
functions and compile farm, and CVS- and SVN-based
configuration management. The commercial versions
for corporate use add features for tracking, measuring
and reporting on software project activities. GForge is
a fork of SourceForge ver. 2.61. It has been
downloaded and configured as in-house server by
many industrial and academic organizations. Like
SourceForge, it also offers a commercial version,
called GForge Advanced Server. Finally, other two
large indexes of free open source software are
Freshmeat [13] and Google Code [16].
Trac [31] provides an integrated wiki, an issue
tracking system and a front-end interface to SCM
tools, usually SVN. Project overview and progress
tracking is allowed by setting a roadmap of milestones,
which include a set of so-called “tickets” (i.e., tasks,
feature requests, bug reports and support issues), and
by viewing the timeline of changes. Trac also allows
team members to be notified about project events and
ticket changes through email messages and RSS feeds.
MASE is a CDE developed at University of Calgary
[23]. MASE puts a great emphasis on knowledge
sharing as it integrates both informal and formal
knowledge representations into a wiki-based
experience repository.
Jazz is an extensible platform, which leverages the
Eclipse’s notion of plug-ins to build CDE products
[14]. The present version has a wide-ranging scope,
but in the former version of Jazz the goal was to
integrate synchronous communication and reciprocal
awareness of coding tasks into the Eclipse IDE,
following Booch and Brown’s vision [6].
5. Discussion
Agile and distributed development practices are so
different that, when blended together, the key
characteristics of the former exacerbate the challenges
intrinsic to the latter. Although previous studies
already suggested balancing practices for tackling
these new dichotomous challenges [26], social
software is now emerging as a practical and
economical option to consider for applying the
following practices:
Improve communication. Blogs and Wikis are
particularly valuable in distributed projects as global
teams may use them to publish their work [22].
Recently, the use of these collaborative web-
50
publishing applications has become quite common,
especially for OSS software projects. Blogs, in the case
of distributed agile development, represent a valuable
means to increase the amount of informal
communication exchanged between team members.
Facilitate knowledge sharing. Any common
information that needs to be tracked and organized by
teams, such as story cards, design guidelines, and build
instructions, can be put on a Wiki. Wikis work well to
hold and share knowledge because they are simple to
use, can be worked with any browser, and are simple
to set up. Wikis are by nature unstructured and this
lack of structure is part of the benefit since teams can
usually evolve their own structure [12],[22].
TagSEA [27] is a research effort that has explored
the usefulness of letting developers annotate pieces of
source code with free tags. In agile distributed settings
the maintenance of the whole process and product
repositories can benefit from the existence of tags used
to annotate also artifacts other than pieces of source
code, bringing in personal and collective rewards.
Build team trust and culture. The necessity to
reduce project costs often makes unfeasible to organize
frequent visits by distributed partners, in order to build
team trust and culture. Traditional global software
development already involves dynamic and evolving
communication-based social networks, often mined for
investigating collaboration and awareness patterns
[10]. Agile distributed teams could also exploit social
network profiles as a mechanism to develop digital
identities, establish connections, and thus, build trust
and common culture among people working on same
projects.
Nevertheless, although the use of social software
can be beneficial for agile distributed software
development, new challenges raise from the
observation that successful examples of social software
adoption rely on both large and non-compulsory users
participation. Whether agile and distributed
development environments could meet the same
condition is a research question that needs further
investigation.
Fun factor. Making the use of social software
mandatory for agile teams may take away from
developers the fun of using such tools, a factor that
usually fosters their adoption in general purpose
scenarios [3].
Critical mass. Social software has proven useful
only after building a large base of thousands users or
more. Instead, in the context of distributed software
development, the overall number of developers
scattered over the remote sites is notable lower.
Collaboration as side effect. The social side of
popular social software applications usually does not
represent the main incentive to individual participation
but it is rather an emerging side effect. People
contribute mostly for a private motivation, although
the global scale of the Web, at the end, brings
additional collective benefits. Does the same principle
hold for different contexts, such as agile distributed
software teams?
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