IT C515 CSCW - Readings for Week 6

Building Collaboration into IDE's

Mostly software developments are not done by single developer, but rather it will be a team work. A team may include project managers, Tasters, architects, designers, programmers, and many more individuals. There for in this kind of situation collaboration will be highly needed, despite the fact that collaboration can be taken as time-consuming and problematic. But still there collaboration within the development environment becomes very important. To facilitate this needs there are some major examples mentioned:

• Configuration Management: - Tools such as CVS (Concurrent Versions System) are the central repositories of the software development team. They are also very structured collaborative tools: They allow developers to exchange, modify, mark, and merge files in a coordinated manner. While powerful, these tools are complex, especially for large development projects. By integrating configuration management into the IDE, we eliminate an extra step to perform shared file management operations.
• Screen Sharing: - A common occurrence in the course of a developer's workday is to ask a colleague to come over to help figure out a problem with some code. The end result is that the code gets fixed more efficiently than if the programmer had pored over the problem alone. Getting another person's viewpoint is codified in practices such as code reviews, pair programming, and—on a larger scale—open source software development.
• E-mail and IM: -Taking context up another notch, ad hoc communication tools such as e-mail and IM are often used for development. And also traceability: The questions and answers about a piece of code, which would normally have been hidden away on an e-mail server or lost in a transient IM, would be a form of code annotation that supplements formal documentation.

Integrating collaborative capabilities into the IDE holds great potential for easing programmers' development activities. This integration introduces a number of technical and design challenges. Major issues include:

• Building for extensibility, interoperability, and flexibility
• Choosing and designing the "right" set of collaborative features
• Supporting transitions between individual and group work

Identification of Coordination Requirements:
Implications for the Design of Collaboration and Awareness Tools

The author’s measures of “fit” refer to the match between a particular organizational design and the organization’s ability to carry out the task. And they have traditionally, focused on two factors:

• The temporal dependencies among tasks that are assigned to organization groups
• The formal organizational structure as a means of communications and coordination.

The authors extends the method proposed by the standard measures of fit by providing a finer-grain level of analysis and also assessing the role of multiple ways of coordination activities.

Coordination Requirement matrix which is generated by taking Task Assignment and Task Dependencies for each of people, whether or not a task dependency exists or the extent to which each pair of people needs to coordinate their work. Whereas Actual Coordination matrix represents the interactions workers engaged in through different means of coordination. Then, given a particular set of dependencies among tasks, congruence in the portion of coordination activities that actually occurred relative to the total number of coordination activates that should have taken place.