Capturing Communication and Context in the Software Project Lifecycle

Capturing design process knowledge is a complex, multi-disciplinary problem. With the advent and increased acceptance of digital computer supported cooperative work tools this project studied how engineering collaboration might be captured and archived to support engineering lifecycle activities. To improve project communications among software engineers and create structured email archives, we developed an environment called CodeLink. CodeLink is a design rationale support tool, integrating email-based collaboration with the software development process, providing teams of developers with a means to automatically associate specific code elements with email messages. In this paper we describe CodeLink’s architecture, user interface, and the results of an informal user study. We believe that by integrating collaborative work tools with development tools, we can enrich the communication within engineering teams and build repositories that detail collaborative decisions made in the development process. These repositories can then be used to facilitate software maintenance and extract design rationale.