Constraining peripheral perception in instant messaging during software development by continuous work context extraction

Abstract

Colocated software development teams benefit from natural work context building, which occurs mainly thanks to the team members, virtually, being forced to listen to what others are talking about. They absorb the information not by directing their attention to the communication, but by being exposed to it and perceiving it peripherally. The same effect of peripheral perception can be enforced with instant messaging, which is a predominant way of communication in distributed teams. However, forcing team members to observe too many and mostly unrelated message notifications can be distracting and causing unnecessary work interruption. This paper presents an approach and tool that ensure peripheral perception in instant messaging constrained by a continuously extracted work context. This is achieved by maintaining a personal work context from developer activities and using this context to filter instant messages to be displayed. A four-week experiment carried out with one of the teams of seven members in the Team Project course at our university indicates that message filtering based on continuous work context extraction performs better over common channel based filtering (as available in Slack). More precisely, message filtering based on continuous work context extraction decreases work interruption and distraction.