World View: creating situational awareness for global software development projects

Visitor: Marcelo Alvim, UC Irvine/BSICS

Student: Anita Sarma, UC Irvine/ISR

Advisor: André van der Hoek, UC Irvine/ISR

Abstract: Global software development involves multiple teams distributed across different countries and time zones, making coordination in such settings particularly difficult. One of the primary reasons for the break-downs in coordination is the lack of project information sharing across teams (e.g., inter-team dependencies, emerging conflicts because of changes to interfaces, availability of team members to communicate). World View is a project awareness tool that aims to visualize and explore different aspects and development patterns of global software projects by using the metaphor of locality as the organizing abstraction. Specifically, it uses a world map to present in-formation regarding locations of team members, dependencies between teams, contact information of team members, their availability, and so on, in order to enable easy sharing of information.

Bio:

Marcelo Alvim holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), and has been has working in the software industry in Brazil since 2001. He is currently a research visitor at the Donald Bren school of Information and Computer Sciences.

Anita Sarma is a Ph.D. student in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at UC Irvine, specializing in software engineering. Her research interests lie in configuration management and awareness, namely, how to coordinate distributed CM workspaces, such that the users are shielded from other developers’ changes, but aware of those changes. She has published papers in the International Conference on Software Engineering and the International Computer Software and Application Conference, among others.