Process Awareness for Distributed Software Development in Virtual Teams

Organizations increasingly define their software development projects as “virtual project teams”, where project members from within the organization cooperate with outside experts and therefore build a “community”, which in many cases o1perates as a highly distributed team. Process modeling, composition and – configuration are substantial ingredients for team activities. This paper analyses the needs for process awareness for virtual teams and derives the requirements for location-transparent distributed and mobile collaboration. It describes the design of virtual project teams that contain mobile users, their artifacts, and processes. The paper distills a framework for process aware virtual project teams that goes beyond current technologies such as peer-to-peer, multiple servers and clients, as well as Workflow Management and Groupware systems.