Aperte.org Jeremy Handcock

I've made my thesis paper available online for those who might be interested. It's entitled How Developers Use an Awareness Tool: Patterns and Scenarios and I've included an abstract below:

Software developers consult numerous sources of information in order to maintain awareness of what happens within their teams. They seek information about what their peers are doing and what project artifacts have changed. Although researchers have proposed many tools to facilitate developers in maintaining awareness, there is currently a lack of understanding about how developers might use them---if at all---in real software projects. We have designed and implemented a new awareness tool for software developers called Aufait. We conducted an exploratory study of developers using Aufait in two organizations over a three-week period and found that they adopted it and used it regularly. We identified a number of usage scenarios in each organization: most commonly, developers used Aufait to manage dependencies between team members and to determine how changes might affect them. We also found common usage patterns. Throughout the course of the study, developers were most interested in changes to source code relative to other artifact types and they were primarily interested in changes that occurred very recently. Together, these patterns and scenarios suggest necessary features as well as implications for the design of future tools. Our results also pose interesting areas of future research.

If you have any questions or feedback, let me know!