Mobile Audio Knowledge Sharing (MAKS), Software Engineering in the New Millenium: Let There Be Sound!

Student: Angelo Pioli, UC Irvine

Project Scientist: Ban Al-Ani, UC Irvine

Advisor:André van der Hoek, UC Irvine/ISR

Abstract:

Software support tools today are becoming more and more ubiquitous. These tools are designed to help reduce the complexity of software engineering activities and increase shared understanding. However, they often only target the sense of sight, by providing information visually (e.g. text, diagrams). Targeting another sense, like hearing, can provide a way to augment information presented in existing tools, help to provide more context about the activities the tools support making those activities more understandable. We propose enabling the user of these tools to manipulate audio files thereby allowing the user greater mobility as well as sharing their knowledge about the activity at hand. The Mobile Audio Knowledge Sharing (MAKS) features we have developed and incorporated into existing tools can allow the user to create and associate audio files to the representations these tools provide. The MAKS audio files created by developers can be played, downloaded, searched and shared by all stakeholders involved with the project. We plan to investigate the impact MAKS can have on stakeholder awareness by observing participants utilizing these feature in our empirical study

Bio:

Angelo Pioli is a fourth year undergraduate Informatics and Psychology and Social Behavior double major at the University of California, Irvine. He is also a member of both the Campuswide and ICS Honors Programs. He is part of the Continuous Coordination Research group where he is working introducing audio to help document software engineering artifacts.