A Robotic Colleague for Facilitating Collaborative Software Development

Robots exist in both the virtual domain of computers and the physical realm with humans, and therefore offer an effective interface between the two. A robot as an autonomous mobile agent can offer visual, audio and tactile interaction for a team of humans to support computer-mediated communications. In this paper, a robot is used to mediate communication between humans for Agile software engineering teams and also delivers system critical information to the developers by providing ambient information about the software build. We believe that agile software engineering, with its human-centric practices, can benefit from the use of a robot to facilitate collaborative software development, and enhance communication between developers.