Co-Creation in Fully Remote Software Teams

In this paper, we use the lens of co-creation---a concept originally coined and applied in the fields of management and design that denotes how groups of people collaboratively create something of meaning through an orchestration of people, activities, and tools---to study how fully remote software teams co-create digital artifacts that can be considered as a form of documentation. We report on the results of a qualitative, interview-based study with 25 software professionals working in remote teams. Our primary findings are the definition of four models of co-creation, examples of sequencing these models into work chains to produce artifacts, factors that influence how developers match tasks to models and chains, and insights into tool support for co-creation. Together, our findings illustrate how co-creation is an intentional activity that has a significant role in how remote software teams' choose to structure their collaborative activities.