Eclipse, Software Development, Awareness, and Coordination

Eclipse, Software Development, Awareness, and Coordination

André van der Hoek, UCI/ISR
Abstract:
Modern software engineering tools exhibit a fundamental paradox: they are meant to support the collaborative activity of software development, but cause individuals and groups to work independently from one another. The underlying issue is that existing tools discretize time and tasks in concrete but isolated process steps. This approach is fundamentally flawed in assuming that human activity can be codified and that periodic resynchronization of tasks is an easy step. In this talk, we present a new approach, continuous coordination, which blends a strong process-based approach with the sharing of "awareness information" to inform developers of relevant ongoing parallel activities. We introduce continuous coordination, as well as how we are working towards realizing its vision in a variety of exploratory software engineering tools.
Biography:
André van der Hoek is an associate professor in the Department of Informatics of the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences and a faculty member of the Institute for Software Research, both at the University of California, Irvine. He holds a joint B.S. and M.S. degree in Business-Oriented Computer Science from the Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

André leads the ART DECO software engineering research group, which focuses on understanding and advancing the role of design, coordination, and education in software. His research is driven by a strong desire to offer practical solutions to real-world problems through the construction of novel software tools and environments. At the same time, his research is framed by a pursuit of novel theoretical contributions that derive from deep understandings of the field. Following this dual philosophy, he has developed several configuration management systems, designed the widely-used xADL 2.0 architecture description language, and created novel educational software engineering approaches used at institutions across the world.

André is the principal designer of the new B.S. in Informatics at UC Irvine and was honored, in 2005, as UC Irvine Professor of the Year for his outstanding and innovative educational contributions.