Literature about design suggests that a variety of alternatives leads to a higher quality final design. When software designers, either individually or together, are designing in front of the whiteboard, they rarely explore different solution alternatives. How can we help designers to explore more design alternatives for software problems? To achieve this, we are working on a process to facilitate designers to collaborate and produce high quality software designs while considering more solution alternatives.
When a live site is down or time is of the essence, software teams mobilize to fix bugs as fast as possible. How might such important bugs be fixed more quickly? One answer is through crowdsourcing, where ad-hoc participants are each given small, self-contained microtasks that are then aggregated into an overall solution. To explore this idea, we are currently designing new techniques and tools for crowd debugging.
Code search has become an integral part of the day-to-day programming activity with developers seeking to take advantage of the vast amount of code and advice available on sites such as Stack Overflow, GitHub, and Ohloh. Finding the 'right' code, however, remains a serious challenge. CodeExchange is a new code search platform that offers social-technical code search: search enriched with social-technical metadata through which targeted queries can be formulated, results quickly filtered, and code that is found easily integrated into the project at hand.
Microtask crowdsourcing systems such as FoldIt and ESP partition work into short, self-contained microtasks, reducing barriers to contribute, increasing parallelism, and reducing the time to complete work. Could this model be applied to software development? To explore this question, we are designing a development process and cloud-based IDE for crowd development.
The development of a software system is now ever more frequently a part of a larger development effort, including multiple software systems that co-exist in the same environment: a software ecosystem. Though most studies of the evolution of software have focused on a single software system, there is much that we can learn from the analysis of a set of interrelated systems. Topic modeling techniques show promise for mining the data stored in software repositories to understand the evolution of a system.
One of the many challenges of software development and maintenance is the need to collaborate among many constituents and stakeholders. For example, clients interact with software development organizations; software-development organizations consist of many developers and maintainers within the same location and across different locations; and the development organization often outsources some of the testing efforts to independent test agencies. Each of these parties may reside in different locations, often across many very disparate time zones.
Software designers frequently sketch when they design, particularly during the early phases of exploration of a design problem and its solution. In so doing, they shun formal design tools, opting for the whiteboard of pen/paper instead. Calico is a sketch-based distributed software design tool that supports software designers with a variety of features that improve over the use of just pen-and-paper or a regular whiteboard, and are tailored specifically for early software design on tablets and electronic whiteboards.
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