Workspace Activity Viewer: Visualizing Project-wide Awareness & Evolution

Students: Roger Ripley, UC Irvine/ISR, Anita Sarma, UC Irvine/ISR

Advisor: André van der Hoek, UC Irvine/ISR

Abstract: Real-time awareness of other developers' activities is a powerful tool to assist in coordination of developer activities. Thus far, this type of awareness tends to focus only on individual developers, with information regarding individual artifacts provided in a contextualized visualization. Taking a broader perspective, we are building a tool, the workspace activity viewer, to visualize and explore workspace activity and evolution on a project-wide basis. We believe this visualization helps not only developers, who can benefit from this high level view by understanding how their work relates, but, more importantly, managers, who now have a comprehensive view of all project activities, allowing them to intelligently steer development and adjust task assignments. Another interesting aspect of our work is that we can visualize the evolution of workspaces—and the emergent project evolution—either live or postmortem: since our tool stores all the workspaces' events, we can replay, stop, rewind, and visually inspect the effort at any given point in time to find trends, problems, and other patterns of interest.

Bio:

Roger M. Ripley is a Ph.D. student in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science at UC Irvine, specializing in software engineering. His research interests include visualizing the "invisible" aspects of software developer activity and the resultant system evolution, as well as infrastructures to support such visualizations.

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.