Anita Sarma

Palantir: raising awareness among configuration management workspaces

Current configuration management systems promote workspaces that isolate developers from each other. This isolation is both good and bad It is good, because developers make their changes without any interference from changes made concurrently by other developers. It is bad, because not knowing which artifacts are changing in parallel regularly leads to problems when changes are promoted from workspaces into a central configuration management repository. Overcoming the bad isolation, while retaining the good isolation, is a matter of raising awareness among developers, an issue traditionally ignored by the discipline of configuration management. To fill this void, we have developed Palantir, a novel workspace awareness tool that complements existing configuration management systems by providing developers with insight into other workspaces. In particular, the tool informs a developer of which other developers change which other artifacts, calculates a simple measure of severity of those changes, and graphically displays the information in a configurable and generally non-obtrusive manner. To illustrate the use of Palantir, we demonstrate how it integrates with two representative configuration management systems.

Tesseract: Interactive visual exploration of socio-technical relationships in software development

Software developers have long known that project success requires a robust understanding of both technical and social linkages. However, research has largely considered these independently. Research on networks of technical artifacts focuses on techniques like code analysis or mining project archives. Social network analysis has been used to capture information about relations among people. Yet, each type of information is often far more useful when combined, as when the “goodness” of social networks is judged by the patterns of dependencies in the technical artifacts. To bring such information together, we have developed Tesseract, an interactive exploratory environment that utilizes cross-linked displays to visualize the myriad relationships between artifacts, developers, bugs, and communications. We evaluated Tesseract by (1) demonstrating its feasibility with GNOME project data (2) assessing its usability via informal user evaluations, and (3) verifying its suitability for the open source community via semi-structured interviews.

Empirical evidence of the benefits of workspace awareness in software configuration management

In this paper, we present results from our empirical evaluations of a workspace awareness tool that we designed and implemented to augment the functionality of software configuration management systems. Particularly, we performed two user experiments directed at understanding the effectiveness of a workspace awareness tool in improving coordination and reducing conflicts. In the first experiment, we evaluated the tool through text-based assignments to avoid interference from the well-documented impact of individual differences among participants, as these differences are known to lessen the observable effect of proposed tools or to lead to them having no observable effect at all. This strategy of evaluating an application in a domain that is known to have less individual differences is novel and in our case particularly helpful in providing baseline quantifiable results. Upon this baseline, we performed a second experiment, with code-based assignments, to validate that the tools beneficial effects also occur in the case of programming. Together, our results provide quantitative evidence of the benefits of workspace awareness in software configuration management, as we demonstrate that it improves coordination and conflict resolution without inducing significant overhead in monitoring awareness cues.

Towards supporting awareness of indirect conflicts across software configuration management workspaces

Workspace awareness techniques have been proposed to enhance the effectiveness of software configuration management systems in coordinating parallel work. These techniques share information regarding ongoing changes, so potential conflicts can be detected during development, instead of when changes are completed and committed to a repository. To date, however, workspace awareness techniques only address direct conflicts, which arise due to concurrent changes to the same artifact, but are unable to support indirect conflicts, which arise due to ongoing changes in one artifact affecting concurrent changes in an-other artifact. In this paper, we present a new, cross-workspace awareness technique that supports one particular kind of indirect conflict, namely those indirect conflicts caused by changes to class signatures. We introduce our approach, discuss its implementation in our workspace awareness tool Palantír, illustrate its potential through two pilot studies, and lay out how to generalize the technique to a broader set of indirect conflicts

Towards Awareness in the Large

Management of shared artifacts is critical to ensure the correct integration and behavior of code created by multiple teams working in concert. Awareness of inter-team development activities and their effects on shared artifacts provides developers the opportunity to detect potential integration problems earlier and take proactive steps to avoid these conflicts. However, current awareness tools do not provide such kinds of awareness making them unsuitable for global software development. In this paper, we discuss their drawbacks, present three strategies to make them suitable for global settings, and illustrate these strategies through a new view for Palantir that better addresses awareness in the large

Continuous coordination within the context of cooperative and human aspects of software engineering

We have developed software tools that aim to support the cooperative software engineering tasks and promote an awareness of social dependencies that is essential to successful coordination. The tools share common characteristics that can be traced back to the principles of the Continuous Coordination (CC) paradigm. However, the development of each sprung from carrying out a different set of activities during its development process. In this paper, we outline the principles of the CC paradigm, the tools that implement these principles and focus on the social aspects of software engineering. Finally, we discuss the socio-technical and human-centered processes we adopted to develop these tools. Our conclusion is that the cooperative dimension of our tools represents the cooperation between researchers, subjects, and field sites. Our conclusion suggests that the development processes adopted to develop like-tools need to reflect this cooperative dimension.

Palantir: coordinating distributed workspaces

Distributed software development suffers from limited collaboration capabilities, as developers are unable to easily coordinate their efforts across physical boundaries. Different fields, such as CSCW and groupware, have attempted to bridge this gap, but few of the approaches developed so far have been incorporated in current software development environments. Configuration management (CM) systems are vital to any software development process, support distributed development, and are in widespread use. Unfortunately, they have only limited support for distributed collaboration. We describe Palantir, a system that is aimed at bringing collaborative capabilities to distributed development. Palantir builds upon existing CM systems to introduce project awareness to the developer workspace. In particular, Palantir supports close collaboration among developers by visualizing concurrent changes and showing, in real time, the severity and impact of those changes on the developers workspace.

Cassandra: proactive conflict minimization through optimized task scheduling

Software conflicts arising because of conflicting changes are a regular occurrence and delay projects. The main precept of workspace awareness tools has been to identify potential conflicts early, while changes are still small and easier to resolve. However, in this approach conflicts still occur and require developer time and effort to resolve. We present a novel conflict minimization technique that proactively identifies potential conflicts, encodes them as constraints, and solves the constraint space to recommend a set of conflict-minimal development paths for the team. Here we present a study of four open source projects to characterize the distribution of conflicts and their resolution efforts. We then explain our conflict minimization technique and the design and implementation of this technique in our prototype, Cassandra. We show that Cassandra would have successfully avoided a majority of conflicts in the four open source test subjects. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach by applying the technique to a simulated set of scenarios with higher than normal incidence of conflicts.

Categorizing the Spectrum of Coordination Technology

Most frameworks that categorize technology for collaborative software development look at only one aspect of coordination support. The Coordination Pyramid classifies technologies according to multiple coordination paradigms, offering a unified, complementary perspective and a structure for evaluating emerging technology.

Which bug should I fix: helping new developers onboard a new project

A typical entry point for new developers in an open source project is to contribute a bug fix. However, finding an appropriate bug and an appropriate fix for that bug requires a good understanding of the project, which is nontrivial. Here, we extend Tesseract - an interactive project exploration environment - to allow new developers to search over bug descriptions in a project to quickly identify and explore bugs of interest and their related resources. More specifically, we extended Tesseract with search capabilities that enable synonyms and similar-bugs search over bug descriptions in a bug repository. The goal is to enable users to identify bugs of interest, resources related to that bug, (e.g., related files, contributing developers, communication records), and visually explore the appropriate socio-technical dependencies for the selected bug in an interactive manner. Here we present our search extension to Tesseract.