Palantír: Increasing Awareness among Distributed Workspaces (slides - PDF)

Presenter: André van der Hoek, Faculty, UCI/ISR

Abstract: Distributed software development, just like regular software development, typically involves developers working in parallel on the same set of artifacts. Unlike regular software development, however, distributed software development is limited since developers are unable to easily coordinate their efforts in person due to the presence of physical boundaries. While configuration management systems provide some automated coordination support in the form of locking and merging, the high cost of conflict resolution in distributed software development requires even higher levels of support to ensure as few integration problems as possible. In this paper, we introduce Palantír, a system that complements existing configuration management systems by providing distributed awareness of project progress. In particular, Palantír provides each developer with a graphical display that not only shows which artifacts are changing in which remote workspaces, but also presents them with a measure of both the severity and the impact of the changes. As a result, developers are provided with an increased level of awareness that allows them to detect and resolve problems much earlier.

Bio: André van der Hoek is an assistant professor in the Department of Information and Computer Science and a faculty member of the Institute for Software Research, both at the University of California, Irvine. He holds a joint B.S. and M.S. degree in Business-Oriented Computer Science from the Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder (the latter obtained while he was a member of the Software Engineering Research Laboratory). His research lies in the discipline of software engineering and has a particular emphasis on configuration management, software architecture, and configurable distributed systems. Although seemingly unrelated, a cohesive and natural connection exists among the three areas. Exploration and exploitation of this connection holds a promise for advanced capabilities that support the design, implementation, and deployment of next-generation software systems. Software engineering education is an additional interest of Van der Hoek. Currently, he is pursuing the development of a software engineering educational environment in which students simulate the software process.