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 [...] Read More…
MIX Online recently released a social timeline prototype that has a lot in common with my research. The MIX tool is essentially a visual FriendFeed: I thought it was extremely apt to see a FriendFeed timeline because I've been describing my tool to others as "a visual FriendFeed for your software development team." I [...] Read More…
I recently started my field study and being it a formative, exploratory study I'm using the grounded theory methodology. I'm only one-third of the way through my tool's deployment and I'm already kind of drowning in data: with usage logs and email interviews, I've got a lot of data on hand. That doesn't [...] Read More…
I'm putting up a poster at the Consortium for Software Engineering Research (CSER) meeting tomorrow. If you're planning to attend, please stop by and say hello! I'm looking forward to talking with people and getting feedback from other researchers. I've been pretty silent about my research here lately, but rest assured that more excitement [...] Read More…
My silence on this blog lately is due to all the toiling I've been doing on my research software. I'd like to say it's because I spent the last month doing research on the beach, but alas, Toronto has had the wettest summer in 70 years. Laptops and Speedos never look great together [...] Read More…
I've developed a few interface mock-ups for a tool I'm building to support awareness in software development. Based on previous empirical studies in this area, I've decided to narrow in on two types of awareness information: changes to shared artifacts and peer activities. The tool integrates changes to artifacts across multiple information repositories [...] Read More…
I went to a nice talk last night by Greg Wilson, my graduate studies advisor, where the subject was his recent publication Beautiful Code. In case you're not familiar with the book, it's a collection of essays by leading programmers that examine a piece of code and explain why it exhibits some kind of [...] Read More…
I'm slightly freaked out that I have only seven months to wrap up my thesis work, so I've been really trying to nail down the specifics of my research in the last few weeks. The biggest challenge has been in finding a balance between doing interesting work and finishing my degree quickly. For a while [...] Read More…
I've been through a lot of interesting papers this past week that deal with information seeking in software development. After reviewing the literature in this space, it strikes me as a good area for me to position my work in software project visualization. The work falls into three major categories: exploratory studies of [...] Read More…
Another grad student and I recently put together a video for a project related to our research. The summary we've been working with follows: Your average software project is made up of a rich history of change events: project emails, bug reports, source code edits, and wiki page edits are common types of change events [...] Read More…