Towards a Shared Repository for Patterns in Virtual Team Collaboration

The way teams use virtual collaboration tools, such as wikis, email systems, social networks, or version control systems can provide indicators for the success or failure of projects. We previously created a platform that allows to collect and analyze these virtual collaboration activities during project runtime in a non-interfering manner. In this paper, we provide a formal definition of collaboration patterns to enable sharing of beneficial or detrimental collaboration behavior amongst scientist and practitioners. We further define a mapping from collaboration pattern descriptions to SPARQL queries that allows to automatically test other projects for occurrences of the described behavior. By that, we provide a research tool that is able to stimulate relevant and rigorous findings in empirical engineering research and lead to the creation of a shared repository of patterns that reflect best practices in virtual team collaboration.