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IMPROMPTU: A New Interaction Framework for Supporting Collaboration in Multiple Display Environments and Its Field Evaluation for Co-located Software Development
"... We present a new interaction framework for collaborating in multiple display environments (MDEs) and report results from a field study investigating its use in an authentic work setting. Our interaction framework, IMPROMPTU, allows users to share task information across displays via off-theshelf app ..."
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Cited by 40 (1 self)
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We present a new interaction framework for collaborating in multiple display environments (MDEs) and report results from a field study investigating its use in an authentic work setting. Our interaction framework, IMPROMPTU, allows users to share task information across displays via off-theshelf applications, to jointly interact with information for focused problem solving and to place information on shared displays for discussion and reflection. Our framework also includes a lightweight interface for performing these and related actions. A three week field study of our framework was conducted in the domain of face-to-face group software development. Results show that teams utilized almost every feature of the framework in support of a wide range of development-related activities. The framework was used most to facilitate opportunistic collaboration involving task information. Teams reported wanting to continue using the framework as they found value in it overall.
Tesseract: Interactive visual exploration of socio-technical relationships in software development
- in Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering, 2009
"... Software developers have long known that project success requires a robust understanding of both technical and social linkages. However, research has largely considered these independently. Research on networks of technical artifacts focuses on techniques like code analysis or mining project archive ..."
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Cited by 30 (2 self)
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Software developers have long known that project success requires a robust understanding of both technical and social linkages. However, research has largely considered these independently. Research on networks of technical artifacts focuses on techniques like code analysis or mining project archives. Social network analysis has been used to capture information about relations among people. Yet, each type of information is often far more useful when combined, as when the “goodness ” of social networks is judged by the patterns of dependencies in the technical artifacts. To bring such information together, we have developed Tesseract, an interactive exploratory environment that utilizes cross-linked displays to visualize the myriad relationships between artifacts, developers, bugs, and communications. We evaluated Tesseract by (1) demonstrating its feasibility with GNOME project data (2) assessing its usability via informal user evaluations, and (3) verifying its suitability for the open source community via semi-structured interviews. 1.
Syde: A tool for collaborative software development
- In ICSE Tool Demo
, 2010
"... Team collaboration is essential for the success of multi-developer projects. When team members are spread across different loca-tions, individual awareness of the activity of others drops due to communication barriers. We built Syde, a tool infrastructure to reestablish team aware-ness by sharing ch ..."
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Cited by 27 (6 self)
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Team collaboration is essential for the success of multi-developer projects. When team members are spread across different loca-tions, individual awareness of the activity of others drops due to communication barriers. We built Syde, a tool infrastructure to reestablish team aware-ness by sharing change and conflict information across developer’s workspaces. Our main challenge is to balance the tradeoff between offering relevant information about the activity of the team and avoiding information overload. The novelty of our approach is that we model source code changes as first-class entities to record the detailed evolution of a multi-developer project. Hence, Syde deliv-ers precise change information to interested developers.
Information needs for software development analytics.
- In ICSE’12,
, 2012
"... Abstract-Software development is a data rich activity with many sophisticated metrics. Yet engineers often lack the tools and techniques necessary to leverage these potentially powerful information resources toward decision making. In this paper, we present the data and analysis needs of profession ..."
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Cited by 23 (3 self)
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Abstract-Software development is a data rich activity with many sophisticated metrics. Yet engineers often lack the tools and techniques necessary to leverage these potentially powerful information resources toward decision making. In this paper, we present the data and analysis needs of professional software engineers, which we identified among 110 developers and managers in a survey. We asked about their decision making process, their needs for artifacts and indicators, and scenarios in which they would use analytics. The survey responses lead us to propose several guidelines for analytics tools in software development including: Engineers do not necessarily have much expertise in data analysis; thus tools should be easy to use, fast, and produce concise output. Engineers have diverse analysis needs and consider most indicators to be important; thus tools should at the same time support many different types of artifacts and many indicators. In addition, engineers want to drill down into data based on time, organizational structure, and system architecture. We validated our guidelines with a proof-ofconcept implementation of an analytics tool, which we used to solicit additional feedback from engineers on how future analytics tools should be designed.
Towards Supporting Awareness of Indirect Conflicts across Software Configuration Management Workspaces
- In Proc. Conference on Automated Software Engineering
, 2007
"... Workspace awareness techniques have been proposed to enhance the effectiveness of software configuration management systems in coordinating parallel work. These techniques share information regarding ongoing changes, so potential conflicts can be detected during development, instead of when changes ..."
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Cited by 22 (2 self)
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Workspace awareness techniques have been proposed to enhance the effectiveness of software configuration management systems in coordinating parallel work. These techniques share information regarding ongoing changes, so potential conflicts can be detected during development, instead of when changes are completed and committed to a repository. To date, however, workspace awareness techniques only address direct conflicts, which arise due to concurrent changes to the same artifact, but are unable to support indirect conflicts, which arise due to ongoing changes in one artifact affecting concurrent changes in another artifact. In this paper, we present a new, cross-workspace awareness technique that supports one particular kind of indirect conflict, namely those indirect conflicts caused by changes to class signatures. We introduce our approach, discuss its implementation in our workspace awareness tool Palantír, illustrate its potential through two pilot studies, and lay out how to generalize the technique to a broader set of indirect conflicts.
Attention please! Learning analytics for visualization and recommendation
- 1st International Conference on Learning Analytics (LAK11
, 2011
"... This paper will present the general goal of and inspiration for our work on learning analytics, that relies on attention metadata for visualization and recommendation. Through information visualization techniques, we can provide a dash-board for learners and teachers, so that they no longer need to ..."
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Cited by 18 (4 self)
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This paper will present the general goal of and inspiration for our work on learning analytics, that relies on attention metadata for visualization and recommendation. Through information visualization techniques, we can provide a dash-board for learners and teachers, so that they no longer need to ”drive blind”. Moreover, recommendation can help to deal with the ”paradox of choice ” and turn abundance from a problem into an asset for learning. 1.
Stack zooming for multifocus interaction in time-series data visualization
- In Proceedings of the IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium
"... Information visualization shows tremendous potential for helping both expert and casual users alike make sense of temporal data, but current time series visualization tools provide poor support for comparing several foci in a temporal dataset while retaining context and distance awareness. We introd ..."
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Cited by 17 (3 self)
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Information visualization shows tremendous potential for helping both expert and casual users alike make sense of temporal data, but current time series visualization tools provide poor support for comparing several foci in a temporal dataset while retaining context and distance awareness. We introduce a method for supporting this kind of multi-focus interaction that we call stack zooming. The approach is based on the user interactively building hierarchies of 1D strips stacked on top of each other, where each subsequent stack represents a higher zoom level, and sibling strips represent branches in the visual exploration. Correlation graphics show the relation between stacks and strips of different levels, providing context and distance awareness among the focus points. The zoom hierarchies can also be used as graphical histories and for communicating insights to stakeholders. We also discuss how visual spaces that support stack zooming can be extended with annotation and local statistics computations that fit the hierarchical stacking metaphor.
Codebook: Social Networking over Code
"... Social networking systems help people maintain connections to their friends, enabling awareness, communication, and collaboration, especially at a distance. In many studies of coordination in software engineering, the work artifacts, e.g. code, bugs, specifications, are themselves the objects that l ..."
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Cited by 17 (4 self)
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Social networking systems help people maintain connections to their friends, enabling awareness, communication, and collaboration, especially at a distance. In many studies of coordination in software engineering, the work artifacts, e.g. code, bugs, specifications, are themselves the objects that link engineers together. In this paper, we introduce Codebook, a social networking web service in which people can be “friends ” not only with other people but with the work artifacts they share with them. Providing a web interface to the graph of these connections will enable software engineers to keep track of task dependencies, discover and maintain connections to other teams, and understand the history and rationale behind the code that they work on and use. 1.
Assessing the Value of Branches with What-if Analysis
"... Branches within source code management systems (SCMs) allow a software project to divide work among its teams for concurrent development by isolating changes. However, this benefit comes with several costs: increased time required for changes to move through the system and pain and error potential w ..."
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Cited by 16 (2 self)
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Branches within source code management systems (SCMs) allow a software project to divide work among its teams for concurrent development by isolating changes. However, this benefit comes with several costs: increased time required for changes to move through the system and pain and error potential when integrating changes across branches. In this paper, we present the results of a survey to characterize how developers use branches in a large industrial project and common problems that they face. One of the major problems mentioned was the long delay that it takes changes to move from one team to another, which is often caused by having too many branches (branchmania). To monitor branch health, we introduce a novel what-if analysis to assess alternative branch structures with respect to two properties, isolation and liveness. We demonstrate with several scenarios how our what-if analysis can support branch decisions. By removing high-costlow-benefit branches in Windows based on our what-if analysis, changes would each have saved 8.9 days of delay and only introduced 0.04 additional conflicts on average.
Empirical Evidence of the Benefits of Workspace Awareness in Software Configuration Management
"... In this paper, we present results from our empirical evaluations of a workspace awareness tool that we designed and implemented to augment the functionality of software configuration management systems. Particularly, we performed two user experiments directed at understanding the effectiveness of a ..."
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Cited by 14 (2 self)
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In this paper, we present results from our empirical evaluations of a workspace awareness tool that we designed and implemented to augment the functionality of software configuration management systems. Particularly, we performed two user experiments directed at understanding the effectiveness of a workspace awareness tool in improving coordination and reducing conflicts. In the first experiment, we evaluated the tool through text-based assignments to avoid interference from the well-documented impact of individual differences among participants, as these differences are known to lessen the observable effect of proposed tools or to lead to them having no observable effect at all. This strategy of evaluating an application in a domain that is known to have less individual differences is novel and in our case particularly helpful in providing baseline quantifiable results. Upon this baseline, we performed a second experiment, with code-based assignments, to validate that the tool’s beneficial effects also occur in the case of programming. Together, our results provide quantitative evidence of the benefits of workspace awareness in software configuration management, as we demonstrate that it improves coordination and conflict resolution without inducing significant overhead in monitoring awareness cues.
