Towards distributed software design meetings: what can we learn from co-located meetings?

While distributed code writing is becoming widespread, object-oriented software design still requires face-to-face interaction, curbing the potential and quality of global software development. Most designers reject general purpose conferencing tools for not meeting their needs, and feature-rich distributed CASE tools for being too formal. Our long-term goal is to develop effective tools for distributed software design that preserve natural working styles.A necessary first step is to identify the unique low-level characteristics of design meetings which must be mimicked in the virtual world. Our work embarks on this path with a detailed ethnographic study of two collocated design meetings. We present several observations and their implications for the design of collaboration tools.