Erik H. Trainer

How to Hackathon: Socio-technical Tradeoffs in Brief, Intensive Collocation

Hackathons are events where people who are not normally collocated converge for a few days to write code together. Hackathons, it seems, are everywhere. We know that long- term collocation helps advance technical work and facilitate enduring interpersonal relationships, but can similar benefits come from brief, hackathon-style collocation? How do participants spend their time preparing, working face-to- face, and following through these brief encounters? Do the activities participants select suggest a tradeoff between the social and technical benefits of collocation? We present results from a multiple-case study that suggest the way that hackathon-style collocation advances technical work varies across technical domain, community structure, and expertise of participants. Building social ties, in contrast, seems relatively constant across hackathons. Results from different hackathon team formation strategies suggest a tradeoff between advancing technical work and building social ties. Our findings have implications for technology support that needs to be in place for hackathons and for understanding the role of brief interludes of collocation in loosely-coupled, geographically distributed work.

Globally distributed system developers: their trust expectations and processes

Trust remains a challenge in globally distributed development teams. In order to investigate how trust plays out in this context, we conducted a qualitative study of 5 multi-national IT organizations. We interviewed 58 individuals across 10 countries and made two principal findings. First, study participants described trust in terms of their expectations of their colleagues. These expectations fell into one of three dimensions: that socially correct behavior will persist, that team members possess technical competency, and that individuals will demonstrate concern for others. Second, our study participants described trust as a dynamic process, with phases including formation, dissolution, adjustment and restoration. We provide new insights into these dimensions and phases of trust within distributed teams which extend existing literature. Our study also provides guidelines on effective practices within distributed teams in addition to providing implications for the extension of software engineering and collaboration tools.

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.

Trust and surprise in distributed teams: towards an understanding of expectations and adaptations

Trust can be defined in terms of one partys expectations of another, and the formers willingness to be vulnerable based on those expectations. Surprise results from a failure to meet expectations, which can influence trust. We conducted an empirical study of surprises stemming from cultural differences in distributed teams and their influence on trust. Our study findings provide two primary contributions. First, we find that trust judgments in culturally diverse teams are made from accumulated experiences that involve a sequence of cultural surprise, attribution, formulation of new expectations, and the application of adaptations in new situations. Second, we document adaptations that individuals develop to avoid future surprises and which ultimately helped them to improve their sense of trust towards others. In general, our findings contribute to the existing body of work by providing evidence of how people attribute specific cultural surprises, the impact on their sense of trust and adaptations.

Impact of collaborative traces on trustworthiness

We investigated how trust among software developers would be affected by providing them with visualizations of collaborative traces. We define collaborative traces to be representations of the past and current activity of a group of developers manipulating software development artifacts. In this paper, we report two main findings. First, we report the results of our controlled experiment in which collaborative traces were visualized. Second, we present an overview of tools which aim to represent collaborative software engineering traces. Our experiment provides evidence that collaborative traces can support the development of several factors of trust identified in our field study. However, we also identified some shortcomings of our current visualizations, gaining insights into future improvements. From our review of tools that represent collaborative traces, we observed that such representations can drive the design of tools that aim to support trust. We also present a table of tools; the table can be used to guide discussion and the design of tools that promote trust in software development.

Community Code Engagements: Summer of Code & Hackathons for Community Building in Scientific Software

Community code engagements -- short-term, intensive software development events -- are used by some scientific communities to create new software features and promote community building. But there is as yet little empirical support for their effectiveness. This paper presents a qualitative study of two types of community code engagements: Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and hackathons. We investigated the range of outcomes these engagements produce and the underlying practices that lead to these outcomes. In GSoC, the vision and experience of core members of the community influence project selection, and the intensive mentoring process facilitates creation of strong ties. Most GSoC projects result in stable features. The agenda setting phase of hackathons reveals high priority issues perceived by the community. Social events among the relatively large numbers of participants over brief engagements tend to create weak ties. Most hackathons result in prototypes rather than finished tools. We discuss themes and tradeoffs that suggest directions for future empirical work around designing community code engagements.

From Personal Tool to Community Resource: What's the Extra Work and Who Will Do It?

Sharing scientific data, software, and instruments is becoming increasingly common as science moves toward large-scale, distributed collaborations. Sharing these resources requires extra work to make them generally useful. Although we know much about the extra work associated with sharing data, we know little about the work associated with sharing contributions to software, even though software is of vital importance to nearly every scientific result. This paper presents a qualitative, interview-based study of the extra work that developers and end users of scientific software undertake. Our findings indicate that they conduct a rich set of extra work around community management, code maintenance, education and training, developer-user interaction, and foreseeing user needs. We identify several conditions under which they are likely to do this work, as well as design principles that can facilitate it. Our results have important implications for future empirical studies as well as funding policy.

Analyzing a socio-technical visualization tool using usability inspection methods

Ariadne is a novel visualization tool that allows end users to explore the socio-technical relationships in software development projects. Essentially the visualization is a variant of a social network graph. It is based on the observation that dependencies between software components create dependencies between the developers implementing those components. This relationship emerged in our own and other researcherspsila field studies of software projects. Large software development projects require management of dependencies by managers and developers to ensure the smooth coordination of work. We sought to evaluate our visualization to assess its utility. Although we had some informal trials with potential end users, we sought a deeper analysis before further refinement of the tool and evaluation on a larger scale. Usability inspection methods provided one potential avenue. Moreover, such inspection methods yield a kind of rationale not directly derived from human subjects evaluations. We report on the application of these inspection methods and discuss the implications of their results in the context of usability evaluations for visual interfaces.

Distributed Developers and the Non-use of Web 2.0 Technologies: A Proclivity Model

We sought to understand the role that Web 2.0 technologies play in supporting the development of trust in globally distributed development teams. We found the use of Web 2.0 technologies to be minimal, with less than 25% of our participants reporting using them and many reporting the disadvantages of adopting them. In response, we sought to understand the factors that led to the use and non-use of these technologies in distributed development teams. We adopted a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze data collected from 61 interviewees representing all common roles in systems development. We discovered six factors that influenced the use and non-use of Web 2.0 technology. We present a proclivity model to frame our findings as well as our conclusions about the interrelationships between the results of our qualitative and quantitative analyses. We also present implications for the design of collaboration tools, which could lead to greater support and usage by distributed developers.

Hacking and Making at Time-Bounded Events: Current Trends and Next Steps in Research and Event Design

Time-bounded collaborative events in which teams work together under intense time pressure are becoming increasingly popular. While hackathons, that is, competitive overnight coding events, are one of the more prevalent examples of this phenomenon, there are many more distinct event design variations for different audiences and with divergent aims, such as sprints, codefests, hack-days, edit-a-thons and so on. Taken together, these events offer new opportunities and challenges for cooperative work by affording explicit, predictable, time-bounded spaces for interdependent work and access to new audiences of collaborators. This one-day workshop brings together researchers interested in the phenomenon, experienced event organizers, and participants interested in running their own events to consolidate research to-date, share practical experiences, and understand what benefits different event variations may offer, how they may be applied in other contexts, and how insights from studying these events may contribute to CSCW knowledge.