Supporting distributed software design meetings: what can we learn from co-located meetings?

Although virtual conferencing tools have been successfully used in executive meetings, current tools appear inadequate for the needs of software designers. As a result, while distributed code writing is becoming widespread, almost all software design meetings are still carried out face-to-face incurring costs that undermine the potential of distributed software development.Our research strives to build successful tools for supporting distributed software design meetings. To do so, we must first identify the unique activities of software design which must be mimicked in the virtual world. This paper does so with a detailed study of two colocated design meetings. We discuss issues that must be tackled in the transition to virtual settings, outline requirements for such tools, and propose strategies for meeting these requirements. In doing so, we also identify problems in existing colocated meetings which could be alleviated with these tools.

[1]  Kent Beck,et al.  A laboratory for teaching object oriented thinking , 1989, OOPSLA 1989.

[2]  Vahid Mashayekhi,et al.  A Case Study of Distributed, Asynchronous Software Inspection , 1997, Proceedings of the (19th) International Conference on Software Engineering.

[3]  Uri Dekel,et al.  Eclipse as a platform for research on interruption management in software development , 2004, eclipse '04.

[4]  Jessica J. Baldis.  Effects of spatial audio on memory, comprehension, and preference during desktop conferences , 2001, CHI.

[5]  Jr. Frederick P. Brooks,et al.  The mythical man-month (anniversary ed.) , 1995 .

[6]  Li-Te Cheng,et al.  How a good software practice thwarts collaboration: the multiple roles of APIs in software development , 2004, SIGSOFT '04/FSE-12.

[7]  Vahid Mashayekhi,et al.  CAIS: collaborative asynchronous inspection of software , 1994, SIGSOFT '94.

[8]  Saul Greenberg.  A fisheye text editor for relaxed-WYSIWIS groupware , 1996, CHI Conference Companion.

[9]  André van der Hoek,et al.  Palantir: raising awareness among configuration management workspaces , 2003, 25th International Conference on Software Engineering, 2003. Proceedings..

[10]  Susan Brennan,et al.  Another person's eye gaze as a cue in solving programming problems , 2004, ICMI '04.

[11]  Colin Ware,et al.  An evaluation of an eye tracker as a device for computer input2 , 1987, CHI 1987.

[12]  Claudia-Lavinia Ignat,et al.  Grouping in collaborative graphical editors , 2004, CSCW.

[13]  Judith S. Olson,et al.  Distance Matters , 2000, Hum. Comput. Interact..

[14]  Nicole Yankelovich,et al.  Meeting central: making distributed meetings more effective , 2004, CSCW.

[15]  Eli Blevis,et al.  Concepts that support collocated collaborative work inspired by the specific context of industrial designers , 2004, CSCW.

[16]  Li-Te Cheng,et al.  Introducing collaboration into an application development environment , 2004, CSCW.

[17]  Wendy Ju,et al.  Where the wild things work: capturing shared physical design workspaces , 2004, CSCW.

[18]  James D. Herbsleb.  Metaphorical representation in collaborative software engineering , 1999 .

[19]  M. Roseman,et al.  A usability study of awareness widgets in a shared workspace groupware system , 1996, CSCW '96.

[20]  Fred P. Brooks,et al.  The Mythical Man-Month , 1975, Reliable Software.

[21]  Dov Dori.  Why significant UML change is unlikely , 2002, CACM.

[22]  Karen Holtzblatt,et al.  Contextual design , 1997, INTR.