Aperte.org Jeremy Handcock

I've put together a demo version of the tool (code name: Aufait) that I developed for my research. Feel free to try it out! If you haven't been following my work, I developed Aufait as an awareness tool for software developers. Specifically, it is designed to support awareness of peer activities and changes to shared artifacts (ie. code, bugs, documents) in a small team.

From a design perspective, there are some things that I would change based on the results of my field study, but I'm interested in your off-the-cuff thoughts as well. Note that this demo is static in the sense that it won't automatically update with new data as Aufait normally would. The time interval selection features are also disabled.

The demo is running on data from the Apache Derby project. I have no affiliation with Derby nor its developers; I just picked a small open source project with data that was relatively easy to obtain for the demo.

If you're interested in seeing how developers use Aufait in the wild, check out my thesis paper. A quick summary of the UI follows.

The Event Timeline

The main view in Aufait is an event timeline. An event is any modification to a project artifact such as source code, a bug report, a project email, or a wiki document. The design has a lot in common with the SIMILE timeline.

Each developer on the team---listed along with his/her photo on the right side of the screen---is associated with a colour. Events on the timeline are coloured according to the developer who initiated them. The idea here is to promote awareness of peer activity by clearly connecting events to individuals.

Revealing Event Content

As you can see, each event on the timeline has a short textual description. For example, an email from the project mailing list shows the subject line:

You can click on nodes in the timeline to reveal more content for an event. Here you can see a bug report event that describes what the developer changed:

Note that Aufait includes a link to the artifact that was modified (whenever possible). As shown above, a bug report event has a link to the bug report. The idea is that developers can get more information about a modified artifact or take responsive action by following the link.

The Details View

In addition to the event timeline, Aufait provides a more content-oriented view that is similar in design to an email or news reader. You can switch to this view by clicking on the 'Details' tab. It has a smaller version of the timeline that you can interact with in the same fashion as the larger one.

Filtering Events

You can filter events using three methods: by developer, by drag selection, and by keyword search. Clicking on any of the developer photos will filter the display to show events authored by him/her:

You can also drag to select events in the timeline. The idea here is that you can select a bunch of events that might be of interest and then switch to the detail view to examine them further.

Typing a keyword into the search box (and pressing enter) will filter events to show only those with content that matches.

For all three filter types, you can remove a filter by activating a new filter or by clicking the 'clear filter' button.

Back-end Services

There are a few back-end services that support Aufait's UI by aggregating, storing, and publishing data from a software team's internal systems. The demo is running on static data files, but when it is running live, Aufait continuously updates itself with new events.

Getting the data for the UI was a large chunk of the work in implementing this tool. I won't get into the details of it all here; have a look at my previous post Aggregating Project Events in the Wild if you're interested in how I did it.