Towards awareness in the large

Management of shared artifacts is critical to ensure the correct integration and behavior of code created by multiple teams working in concert. Awareness of inter-team development activities and their effects on shared artifacts provides developers the opportunity to detect potential integration problems earlier and take proactive steps to avoid these conflicts. However, current awareness tools do not provide such kinds of awareness making them unsuitable for global software development. In this paper, we discuss their drawbacks, present three strategies to make them suitable for global settings, and illustrate these strategies through a new view for Palantir that better addresses awareness in the large.