Collaboration among individuals - from users to developers - is central to modern software engineering. It takes many forms: joint activity to solve common problems, negotiation to resolve conflicts, creation of shared definitions, and both social and technical perspectives impacting all software development activity. The difficulties of collaboration are also well documented. The grand challenge is not only to ensure that developers in a team deliver effectively as individuals, but that the whole team delivers more than just the sum of its parts.

The editors of this book have assembled an impressive selection of authors, who have contributed to an authoritative body of work tackling a wide range of issues in the field of collaborative software engineering. The resulting volume is divided into four parts, preceded by a general editorial chapter providing a more detailed review of the domain of collaborative software engineering. Part 1 is on "Characterizing Collaborative Software Engineering", Part 2 examines various "Tools and Techniques", Part 3 addresses organizational issues, and finally Part 4 contains four examples of "Emerging Issues in Collaborative Software Engineering".

As a result, this book delivers a comprehensive state-of-the-art overview and empirical results for researchers in academia and industry in areas like software process management, empirical software engineering, and global software development. Practitioners working in this area will also appreciate the detailed descriptions and reports which can often be used as guidelines to improve their daily work.

1) Colaborative Software Engineering: Concepts and Techniques.- Part 1: Characterizing Collaborative Software Engineering 2) Global Software Engineering: A Software Process Approach - 3) Requirements-Driven Collaboration: Leveraging the Invisible Relationsships between Requirements and People - 4) Collaboration in Software Engineering: Five Stages of Decoupling - 5) Collaboration, Communication and Coordination in Agile Software Development Practice - 6) Applications of Ontologies in Collaborative Software Development Part 2: Tools and Techniques 7) Towards and Beyond Being There in Collaborative Software Development - 8) Continuous Coordination Tools and Their Evaluation - 9) The Configuration Management Role in Collaborative Software Engineering - 10) The GRIFFIN Collaborative Virtual Community for Architectural Knowledge Management - 11) Supporting Expertise Communication in Developer-Centered Collaborative Software Development Environments Part 3: What We Know about Collaborative Software Engineering 12) Distributed and Collaborative Software Analysis - 13) Dynamic Analysis of Communication and Collaboration in OSS Projects - 14) A Comparison of Commonly Used Processes for Multi-Site Software Development Part 4: Emerging Issues in Collaborative Software Engineering 15) Collaboration Practices and Affordances in OSS Development - 16) OUTSHORE Maturity Model: Assistance for Software Offshore Outsourcing Decisions - 17) Collaborative Software Architecting through Knowledge Sharing - 18) Collaborative Product Line Requirements Engineering using Rationale - 19) Collaborative Software Engineering: Challenges and Prospects.