Continuous Coordination within the Context of Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering

Students: Erik Trainer, UC Irvine/ISR, Roger Ripley, UC Irvine/ISR

Project Scientist: Ban Al-Ani, UC Irvine, Post-Doc: Anita Sarma, CMU (formerly UC Irvine/ISR)

Advisor: André van der Hoek, UC Irvine/ISR, David F. Redmiles, UC Irvine/ISR

Abstract:

The Continuous Coordination group in the Department of Informatics has developed software tools that aim to support the cooperative software engineering tasks and promote an awareness of social dependencies that is essential to successful coordination. The tools share common characteristics that can be traced back to the principles of the Continuous Coordination (CC) paradigm. However, the development of each sprung from carrying out a different set of activities during its development process. In this paper, we outline the principles of the CC paradigm, the tools that implement these principles and focus on the social aspects of software engineering. Finally, we discuss the socio-technical and human-centered processes we adopted to develop these tools. Our conclusion is that the cooperative dimension of our tools represents the cooperation between researchers, subjects, and field sites. Our conclusion suggests that the development processes adopted to develop like-tools need to reflect this cooperative dimension.

Bio:

Erik Trainer is a third-year Informatics PhD student of David Redmiles in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences 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 software tools and visualizations to support awareness of people's activities in collaborative software development. Currently, he is researching the value of variations of social network visualizations for understanding socio-technical patterns that emerge in the development of large software projects. He is also exploring the applicability of social network analysis metrics to coordination, particularly in distributed projects where participants rely heavily on asynchronous communication mechanisms.