Supporting a flexible grouping mechanism for collaborating engineering teams.

Most engineering tools do not provide much support for collaborating teams and today's engineering knowledge repositories lack flexibility and are limited. Engineering teams have different needs and their team members have different preferences on how and when to collaborate. These needs may depend on the individual work style, the role an engineer has, and the tasks they have to perform within the collaborating group. However, individual collaboration is insufficient and engineers need to collaborate in groups. This work presents a collaboration framework for collaborating groups capable of providing synchronous and asynchronous mode of collaboration. Additionally, our approach enables engineers to mix these collaboration modes to meet the preferences of individual group members. We evaluate the scalability of this framework using four real life large collaboration projects. These projects were found from GitHub and they were under active development by the time of evaluation. We have tested our approach creating groups of different sizes for each project. The results showed that our approach scales to support every case for the groups created. Additionally, we scouted the literature and discovered studies that support the usefulness of different groups with collaboration styles.