Enabling Project Awareness and Intersubjectivity via Hypermedia-Enabled Event Trails

Supporting project awareness in the context of large-scale software development is difficult. One key problem is identifying appropriate abstractions and techniques for the insertion of project awareness mechanisms into a software development environment with minimal impact. An additional problem is scaling project awareness mechanisms to handle the demands of large-scale software development projects. We present a framework to support awareness and intersubjectivity among software team members through the use of automatically collected, hypermedia-enabled event trails. Event notification and open hypermedia concepts, techniques, and tools are used to support the framework in addressing the two problems identified above. A distinction of the framework is the presence of mechanisms that explicitly support intersubjectivity among team members, enabling a high degree of quality to the project awareness in the team.