Ariadne - Managing Software Development Complexity

Students: Stephen Quirk, UC Irvine/ISR , Erik Trainer, UC Irvine/ISR

Advisor: David F. Redmiles, UC Irvine/ISR

Abstract: Large-scale software development becomes increasingly difficult due to the overwhelming number of dependencies that can arise between software engineers throughout the course of a software project. These dependencies necessitate communication and coordination that requires continuous effort on the behalf of developers. Combined with existing empirical studies on awareness, our own studies have confirmed that technical dependencies between software artifacts create social dependencies among the developers implementing these artifacts. This observation has motivated us to create Ariadne, a plug-in for the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment. Ariadne analyzes a software development project for technical dependencies and collects authorship information from the project's associated configuration management repository. After annotating the technical dependencies with authorship information, Ariadne infers social dependencies among developers. Leveraging Eclipse's well-established user base and its popular plug-in format, we feel that there is a significant need for such a tool. As such, we have designed Ariadne to be tightly integrated with Eclipse in order to ensure that it complements developers' activities in the IDE. We have evaluated Ariadne in open source and commercial software development projects and have shown that the information the tool provides is useful to software developers.

Bio:

Stephen Quirk is a second year Ph.D. student in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. He received his B.S. in Information and Computer Science at UC Irvine in 2005. Stephen's general research interests include computer-supported cooperative work, human-computer interaction, and software engineering.

Erik Trainer is a second year Informatics PhD student in the school of Information and Computer Science at UC Irvine. He also did his undergraduate work at UC Irvine, and received a B.S. in Information and Computer Science in 2001. His research interests include shared software visualizations to facilitate program understanding, collaborative software development, and human-computer interaction. Currently, he is researching the use of visualizations to address communication and coordination needs in large software development projects.