skip to main content
10.1145/1180875.1180883acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagescscwConference Proceedingsconference-collections
Article

Designing task visualizations to support the coordination of work in software development

Published: 04 November 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Software development tools primarily focus on supporting the technical work. Yet no matter the tools employed, the process followed, or the size of the team, important aspects of development are non-technical, and largely unsupported. For example, increasing distribution of development teams highlights the issues of coordination and cooperation. This paper focuses on one area: managing change requests. Interviews with industry and open-source programmers were used to create designs for the visual inspection of change requests. This paper presents fieldwork findings and two designs. We conclude by reflecting on the issues that task visualizations that support social inferences address in software development.

References

[1]
Ackerman, M. S. and Starr, B. Social activity indicators" interface components for CSCW systems. In ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST). 1995. (Pittsburgh, PA, 159--168.
[2]
Ball, T., Kim, J. M., Porter, A. A. and Siy, H. P. If your version control system could talk. In International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) Workshop on Process Modelling and Empirical Studies of Software Engineering. 1997. (Boston, MA,May 17-23).
[3]
Bederson, B. B., Grosjean, J. and Meyer, J., Toolkit Design for Interactive Structured Graphics. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2004. 30,8 535--546.
[4]
Bellotti, V. and Bly, S. Walking Away from the Desktop Computer: Distributed Collaboration in a Product Design Team. In CSCW96. 1996 ACM Press.
[5]
Bowers, J. The work to make a network work: Studying CSCW in action. In Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). 1994. (Chapel Hill, NC., ACM Press, 287--298.
[6]
Bradner, E., Kellogg, W. A. and Erickson, T. The adoption and use of 'BABBLE': a field study of chat in the workplace. In Proceedings of the Sixth European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. 1999. (Copenhagen, Denmark, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 139--158.
[7]
Brooks Jr., F. P., The Mythical Man-Month. 20th Anniversary Edition ed. Addison-Wesley, Reading MA, 1995.
[8]
Brown, A. W. and Booch, G., Collaborative Development Environments, in Advances in Computers, Zelkowitz, M. V., Editor. 2003, Academic Press: San Diego, CA. p. 1--26.
[9]
Carstensen, P. H., Sorensen, C. and Tuikka, T., Let's talk about bugs! Scandanavian Journal of Information Systems, 1995. 7, 1 33--54.
[10]
Cubranic, D. and Murphy, G. C., Hipikat: Recommending Pertinent Software Development Artifacts. IEEE, 2003.
[11]
Cubranic, D., Murphy, G.C., Singer, J., Booth, K.S.(Learning from Project History: A Case study for software development. In CSCW. 2004. (Chicago, Ill., ACM.
[12]
deSouza, C., Frohlich, J. and Dourish, P. Seeking the Source: Software Source Code as a Social and Technical Artifact. In GROUP 05. 2005. (Sanibel Island,November 2005) ACM, 197--202.
[13]
deSouza, C., Redmiles, D. and Dourish, P. "Breaking the Code": Moving between private and public work in collaborative software development. In GROUP. 2003. (Sanibel Island, FL., ACM Press, 105--114.
[14]
Donath, J., Karahalios, K. and Biegas, F. Visualizing Conversation. In Thirty Second Hawai'i International Conference on Systems Science. 1999. (Maui, Hawaii, IEEE Computer Society Press.
[15]
Donath, J. and Viegas, F. The chat circles series: Explorations in designing abstract graphical communication interfaces. In Designing Interactive Systems (DIS). 2002 ACM Press.
[16]
Eick, S. G., Graves, T. L., Karr, A. F., Mockus, A. and Schuster, P., Visualizing Software Changes. Transactions on Software Engineering, 2002. 28,4 396--412.
[17]
Elliot, M. S. and Scacchi, W. Free software developers as an occupational community: Resolving conflicts and fostering collaboration. In GROUP '03. 2003. (Sanibel Island, FL,Nov 2003).
[18]
Erickson, T., Huang, W., Danis, C., and Kellogg, W.A. A social proxy for distributed tasks: Design and evaluation of a prototype. Proc. CHI 2004, ACM Press (2004), 559--566.
[19]
Grinter, R. E. From Local to Global Coordination: Lessons from Software Reuse. In GROUP 01. 2001. (Boulder, CO,Sept 30-Oct 3) ACM Press, 144--153.
[20]
Gutwin, C., Penner, R. and Schneider, K. Group Awareness in Distributed Software Development. In CSCW 2004. 2004. (Chicago IL,72--81.
[21]
Halverson, C. A., Erickson, T. and Sussman, J. What counts as sucess? Rhythmic patterns of use in a persistent chat environment. In GROUP 03. 2003. (Sanibel Island, FL.,Nov 2003).
[22]
Herbsleb, J. D. and Grinter, R. E. Splitting the organization and integrating the code: Conway's law revisited. In International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). 1999. (Los Angeles, CA, May 16-22)85--95.
[23]
Herbsleb, J. D. and Mockus, A. Formulation and Preliminary Test of an Empirical Theory of Coordination in Software Engineering. In ESEC/FSE. 2003. (Helsinki, Finland, ACM, 138--147.
[24]
Herbsleb, J. D., Mockus, A., Finholt, T. A. and Grinter, R. E. Distance, dependencies and delay in a global collaboration. In Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). 2000. (Philadelphia, PA,December 1-6) 319--328.
[25]
Hill, W. C., Hollan, J. D., Wroblewski, D. and McCandless, T. Edit Wear and Read Wear. In Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). 1992. (Monterey, CA., ACM Press, 3--9.
[26]
Knudsen, D. B., Barofsky, A. and Satz, L. R. A Modification Request Control System. In International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). 1976. (San Francisco, CA, IEEE Computer Society, 187--192.
[27]
Leszak, M., Perry, D. E. and Stoll, D. A case study in root cause defect analysis. In International Conference on Software Engineering. 2000. (Limerick, Ireland, ACM Press, 428--437.
[28]
Malone, T. W. and Crowston, K., The Interdisciplinary Study of Coordination. ACM Computing Surveys, 1994. 26,1 (March 1994), p. 87--119.
[29]
Mayrhauser, A. v. and Vans, A. M. Program understanding behavior during Debugging of Large Scale Software. In Seventh Workshop on Empirical Studies of Programmers. 1997 ACM Press, 157--179.
[30]
Mockus, A., Fielding, R. T. and Herbsleb, J. D., Two Case Studies of Open Source Software Development: Apache and Mozilla. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 2002. 11,3 (July 2002), p. 309--346.
[31]
Olson, G. and Olson, J. S., Distance Matters. Human Computer Interaction, 2000. 15,2/3 139--178.
[32]
Perry, D. E., Siy, H. P. and Votta, L., Parallel changes in large-scale software development: An observational case study. Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (ToSEM), 2001. 10,3 (July, 2001), p. 308--337.
[33]
Perry, D. E., Staudenmayer, N. and Votta, L., People, organizations and Process Improvement. IEEE Software, 1994. 11,4 (July, 1994), p. 36--45.
[34]
Pinzger, M., Gall, H., Fischer, M. and Lanza, M. Visualizing multiple evolution metrics. In ACM Symposium on Sofware Visualization (SoftVis). 2005. (St. Louis, MO,May 14-15) ACM Press, 67--75.
[35]
Sandusky, R. J. and Gasser, L. Negotiation and the Coordination of Information and Activity in Distributed Software Problem Management. In GROUP 05. 2005. (Sanibel Island FL, Nov 2005).
[36]
Schmidt, K. and Simone, C., Coordination mechanisms: towards a conceptual foundation of CSCW systems design. Journal of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (JCSCW), 1996. 5, 2/3 155--200.
[37]
Smith, M. and Fiore, A. Visualization components for persistent conversation. In Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). 2001. (Seattle WA,3/31 - 4/5) ACM Press.
[38]
Storey, M. A., Cubranic, D. and German, D. M. On the use of visualization to support awareness of human activities in software development: A survey and framework. In ACM Symposium on Software Visualization (SoftVis). 2005. (St. Louis, MO., ACM Press, 193--216.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)A Systematic Literature Review on the Influence of Enhanced Developer Experience on Developers' Productivity: Factors, Practices, and RecommendationsACM Computing Surveys10.1145/368729957:1(1-46)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2024
  • (2022)Taxonomy of bug tracking process smellsInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2022.106972150:COnline publication date: 4-Aug-2022
  • (2021)Towards a Taxonomy of Bug Tracking Process Smells: A Quantitative Analysis2021 47th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA)10.1109/SEAA53835.2021.00026(138-147)Online publication date: Sep-2021
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
CSCW '06: Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work
November 2006
548 pages
ISBN:1595932496
DOI:10.1145/1180875
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 04 November 2006

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. change tracking systems
  2. coordination of work
  3. information visualization
  4. social visualization
  5. software development
  6. task visualization

Qualifiers

  • Article

Conference

CSCW06
Sponsor:
CSCW06: Computer Supported Cooperative Work
November 4 - 8, 2006
Alberta, Banff, Canada

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

Upcoming Conference

CSCW '25

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)22
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 27 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)A Systematic Literature Review on the Influence of Enhanced Developer Experience on Developers' Productivity: Factors, Practices, and RecommendationsACM Computing Surveys10.1145/368729957:1(1-46)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2024
  • (2022)Taxonomy of bug tracking process smellsInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2022.106972150:COnline publication date: 4-Aug-2022
  • (2021)Towards a Taxonomy of Bug Tracking Process Smells: A Quantitative Analysis2021 47th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA)10.1109/SEAA53835.2021.00026(138-147)Online publication date: Sep-2021
  • (2020)A Framework on Division of Work Tasks between Humans and Robots in the HomeMultimodal Technologies and Interaction10.3390/mti40300444:3(44)Online publication date: 27-Jul-2020
  • (2020)How do Data Science Workers Collaborate? Roles, Workflows, and ToolsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/33928264:CSCW1(1-23)Online publication date: 29-May-2020
  • (2020)Process Inspection SupportProceedings of the International Conference on Software and System Processes10.1145/3379177.3388900(81-90)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2020
  • (2018)Eight Observations and 24 Research Questions About Open Source ProjectsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/32743262:CSCW(1-22)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2018
  • (2018)Accountability in Brazilian Governmental Software ProjectComputer Supported Cooperative Work10.1007/s10606-018-9326-027:3-6(715-740)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2018
  • (2017)Collaboration Process Pattern Approach to Improving Teamwork Performance: A Data Mining-Based MethodologyINFORMS Journal on Computing10.1287/ijoc.2016.073929:3(438-456)Online publication date: Aug-2017
  • (2017)Herding cats in a FOSS ecosystem: a tale of communication and coordination for release managementJournal of Internet Services and Applications10.1186/s13174-017-0063-28:1Online publication date: 30-Aug-2017
  • Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media