Hans-Jörg Happel

When users become collaborators: towards continuous and context-aware user input

Current requirements engineering practices for gathering user input are characterized by a number of communication gaps between users and engineers, which might lead to wrong requirements. The problem situations and context which underlie user input are either gathered back in time, or submitted with wrong a level of details. We think that making user input a first order concern of both software processes and software systems harbours many innovation opportunities. We propose and discuss a continuous and context-aware approach for communicating user input to engineering teams and other users, by a) instrumenting the problem domain, b) proactively recommending to share feedback and c) annotating graphical interfaces.

From work to word: How do software developers describe their work?

Developers take notes about their work sessions, either to remember the work status and share it with collaborators, or because employers explicitly require this for project management matters. We report on an exploratory study which aims at understanding how software developers describe their work. We analyzed more than 750,000 work descriptions of about 2,000 professionals taken over 8 years in three settings. We observed several similarities in the content and time meta-data of work descriptions. Most frequent terms, such as top-30 performed activities, are used consistently. Particular templates such as “ACTION concerning ARTIFACT because of CAUSE” occur frequently. Developers described sessions that last 30–120 min. 4–16 times a day. Maintaining diaries seems to consume between 3–6% of the total work time, and in 10% of the sessions, developers did not describe their work in sufficient detail. We argue that our results make the first step towards automatically generating work diaries for software developers.

Applications of Ontologies in Collaborative Software Development

Making distributed teams more efficient is one main goal of Collaborative Software Development (CSD) research. To this end, ontologies, which are models that capture a shared understanding of a specific domain, provide key benefits. Ontologies have formal, machine-interpretable semantics that allow to define semantic mappings for heterogeneous data and to infer implicit knowledge at run-time. Extending development infrastructures and software architectures with ontologies (of problem and solution domains) will address coordination and knowledge sharing challenges in activities such as documentation, requirements specification , component reuse, error handling, and test case management. The purpose of this article is to provide systematic account of how ontologies can be applied in CSD, and to describe benefits of both existing applications such as “semantic wikis ” as well as visionary scenarios such as a “Software Engineering Semantic Web ”.

Closing Information Gaps with Inverse Search

In this paper, we propose to improve the overall process of information retrieval by explicitly addressing information provision from private spaces of individual users into the public information space of an organization. Therefore, we present our approach of inverse search , which aims to stimulate the diffusion of documents from these private spaces. We introduce the notion of an organizational information need (OIN) based on query logs and further usage statistics of our system. This information is used to recommend people to share private documents containing relevant information. Our main contributions are describing means to identify documents that should be shared and a framework to foster the diffusion of such documents. We also describe the implementation and results from initial evaluation studies.

Team: towards a software engineering semantic web

Large software development projects are complex endeavours that involve numerous participants which can work across several sites and act in various roles. Each participant produces and consumes information relevant for the success of the project. In such settings, an effective and efficient allocation of knowledge is a hard challenge, especially if there is no central authority, which enforces standards for the whole ecosystem. We consider semantic technologies as an important enabler to improve information and knowledge sharing in such scenarios, by helping to exchange and interconnect software engineering knowledge across the web. In this paper, we describe the corresponding vision of a Software Engineering Semantic Web and the role of intelligent IDEs in order to benefit from and contribute to it.

Leveraging Source Code Search for Reuse

The importance of search as a central support activity for information handling and software reuse has been highlighted by several authors. Although it is one of the most dominant daily activities of developers, it is not a first order concern of most development tools. Recently a number of specialized search engines for source code emerged that enable access to reusable assets from both the web and within organizations. We argue that those source code search engines can play a key role for information access throughout the software development lifecycle. In this paper we present an analysis of existing approaches and tools. Furthermore we point out several shortcomings and provide a roadmap for future enhancements.

Managing Requirements Knowledge (MaRK_08)

MaRK_08 focuses on potentials and benefits of lightweight knowledge management approaches, such as ontology-based annotation, semantic Wikis and rationale management techniques, applied to requirements engineering. Methodologies, processes and tools for capturing, externalizing, sharing and reusing of knowledge in (distributed) requirements engineering processes are discussed. Furthermore, the workshop is an interactive exchange platform between the knowledge management community, requirements engineering community and industrial practitioners. This proceeding includes selected and refereed contributions.

Fostering knowledge sharing by inverse search

In this paper we present the idea of inverse search - an approach that aims to stimulate the diffusion of documents from the private spaces of individual workers into the shared space of an organization. Therefore we derive an organizational information need (OIN) based on query logs and further usage statistics of our system. This information is used to recommend people to share private documents containing relevant knowledge.