Daniel M. German , Davor Cubrani? , Margaret-Anne D. Storey, A framework for describing and understanding mining tools in software development, ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, v.30 n.4, July 2005 [pdf]
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This paper present a framework for comparing visualization tools that provide awareness
for human activities in software development. Awareness is defined as an understanding of the activities of the others which provides the context for one’s own activity. According to the authors, awareness provides information on who is doing what and on which artifacts. The paper reviews the state of the art of systems that have been developed to provide awareness during software development. The general conclusions of the review are that there is a need for requirements, the desiderable features that should be provided by an awareness tool.A second conclusion is that there is the need to find good sources of facts that can be used to construct the representations. Additionally some deeper research is required to understand how to combine different visualizations in a way that can be used by the users to answer the question s/he might have. Finally there is the need for more specific and deep evaluation of the effectiveness of such systems.

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