Communication strategies for mentoring in software development projects

Copyright 2014 ACM. As with professionals in all engineering disciplines, software developers new to a project must be given the implicit and explicit knowledge they need to be productive, in an effective and appropriate way, due to fluid team dynamics, geographical distribution, and other factors. As part of a broader study of communication in software development, we focus here on communication strategies for mentoring. We explore some examples of mentoring-oriented communication, in an educational setting and in an open-source consortium of academics and professionals. We plan to draw out recurring patterns of communication between mentors and protégés