Towards the Evaluation of Awareness Information Support Applied to Peer Reviews of Software Engineering Diagrams

Evaluation of group support is a complex task and its design must be carefully planned in order to produce useful results. Many factors may influence the evaluation design, some of them have been suggested in the literature. However, in a particular evaluation context, additional factors may arise, influencing and even compromising the evaluation design. We argue that preliminary evaluations must be performed before they are conducted in a real setting in order to verify if its design will provide the expected measurements and results. This paper presents the evaluation process of awareness information resources within software diagrams peer reviews. The paper describes the evaluation context, objectives, plan and design together with the enactment of a preliminary case study following this design. From this preliminary study, we outline some factors that arose during its enactment that influenced the refinement of the evaluation design.