Milton Pires Ramos

An architecture for supporting small collocated teams in cooperative software development

Most CSCW and groupware systems focus the activities of distributed teams involved in large projects by means of tools for communication and awareness. The activities of small collocated teams are often neglected. Analyzing preliminary requirements of small teams, it is possible to observe the need of tools to help the elaboration of project documentation. This paper presents a multi-agent system architecture to support software development in small collocated teams. The architecture proposed in this paper tackles the problem of elaborating documentation, by facilitating the elaboration of the Small Project Management Plan [1]. Tools used in the software development are encapsulated by agents that extract and organize useful information for the elaboration of such a document.

Supporting small teams in cooperatively building application domain models

Building application domain models is a time-consuming activity in software engineering. In small teams, it is an activity that involves almost all participants, including developers and domain experts. In our approach, we support the knowledge engineering activity by reusing tagging done by team participants when they search information on the Web about the applications domain. Team participants collaborate implicitly when they do tagging because their individually created tags are collected and form a folksonomy. This folksonomy reflects their knowledge about the domain and it is the base for eliciting domain model elements in the knowledge acquisition and conceptualization tasks in a consensual way. Experiments provide evidence that our approach helps team participants to build richer domain models than if they do not use our software tool. The tool allows the reuse of simple annotations as long as users learn about the applications domain.

Toward a knowledge-based framework to foster innovation in networked organisations

To foster innovation management in enterprises willing for competitive advantage in the near future, managers should be aware about and make use of well-adapted information technology solutions. Such assertion is specially emphasized in networked organizations, such as the virtual, extended or distributed enterprises, and provides several open questions guiding to sensible research efforts. The paper particularly focuses on a basic question: how information technology can be used to recover the individual knowledge, the intellectual capital, and transform it into products and services that can be exploited by the organisation? In this sense, an IT-based framework is proposed to basically support the life cycle of knowledge in networked organizations.

MODUS-SD: User modeling in collaborative software development

During the software development cycle, artifacts (source-code, documentation, user manuals, etc.) are written, most of them, cooperatively. Each participant in a software development team plays a specific role, but may write an artifact cooperatively with participants playing different roles. In large and distributed teams the roles are well-defined and mainly respected. In small teams however, a participant may perform different roles simultaneously. We have already proposed the architecture of a system (called CSCW-SD) to support small collocated teams developing software. We are now adding to CSCW-SD a module, called MODUS-SD, capable of modeling users. In this paper we present this module, how it was implemented and present a case study, with preliminary results, in the context of modeling Java developers in a collaborative software development team.

A semi-automatic source code documentation method for small software development teams

Software developers often face the task of documenting source code. For many of them, documenting code development is a boring task. However, source code documentation is an important task, especially when dealing with groups of developers. An updated documentation allows group members to have greater visibility on what has been and is being developed, allowing the reuse of source code. This research aims at designing, developing and validating a semi-automatic documentation method for source code from the existing design documentation on a particular project being developed by a small team, as well as updating this documentation from information gathered from the source code under development. It is understood as design documentation, those documents or parts of documents that are linked directly to the code under construction.

Statistical and Biological Validation Methods in Cluster Analysis of Gene Expression

Data clustering methods have become standard techniques in the analysis of gene expression data. They are used in a variety of tasks ranging from simple data pre- treatment for posterior analysis to the identification of important information, such as gene function and/or the participation of a group of genes in a given biological process. Data clustering methods also offer advantages to the biologist from the economic point of view and given the time that would be necessary to obtain this type of information without the aid of intelligent computational methods. This work aims at guiding the choices in order to get the best possible solution from data clustering. To do so, algorithms from different approaches were used, i.e. k-means and SOM algorithms belong to the unidimentional approach and SAMBA algorithm, a bidimentional approach. Methods of statistical and biological validation were employed in order to choose the best data clustering solution. Results presented here demonstrated that the statistic validation methods were hardly in agreement with the biology validation method. Furthermore, some advantages of the SOM algorithm over the k-means algorithm were observed. Use of the bidimentional algorithm SAMBA revealed dataset structure not identified by the unidimentional algorithms. It was possible to aggregate meaningfull biological information to genes of unknown function. All the content of this work, including all the data clustering and detailed analysis are available at the URL http://www.ppgia.pucpr.br/~nievola/clusteranalysis.

TWA: An experimental approach for studying knowledge sharing in multicultural cooperation

Cooperative work involves several specialists who necessarily have different cultures, which leads to misunderstandings. International cooperation adds language problems and increases the cultural differences, making the sharing of knowledge even more complex. The paper reports some problems encountered in different collaborative situations. It proposes an experimental system, TWA, based on a multi-agent approach architectured around the concept of personal assistant agent. The goal is to study how to better understand the problem and to try to smooth out the cultural differences between participants in cooperative projects.

Dialog construction in a collaborative project management environment

In this paper, we discuss the construction of dialogs for Personal Assistant Agents that are in charge of the interface between users and a Multi-Agent System. Such a system aims at providing support for small teams developing software collaboratively. These small teams have specific needs such as the integration of free or open-source tools or the support to elaborate project documentation. Considering such specific needs, we have elaborated a Multi-Agent architecture that has been implemented using a platform called OMAS. We present the structure that OMAS offers to handle dialogs with users and discuss some implementation details. We also describe some of the dialogs that represent interactions between members of small software development teams and their Personal Assistant Agents. We consider that the use of Personal Assistant Agents can help small teams to handle documentation issues in an integrated and undemanding way.

A collaborative virtual workspace for software development

Software development is a collaborative activity, dependent on technology and performed by groups of people. The software technology involved is an important factor, since it provides the necessary tools for the development of the work. This paper presents a collaborative virtual workspace that follows the code development, comparing it with the models developed in earlier stages. It provides useful information for professionals involved in the task of developing code and even managing the project. It aims at allowing monitoring of the project, helping users to be aware of the context in which they are working. We present its main features and architecture. Results of experimentations show the value of the workspace as a tool to support awareness and software verification.

COMENTE+: A TOOL FOR IMPROVING SOURCE CODE DOCUMENTATION USING INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

Document source code is seen as a boring time consuming task by several developers. However, a welldocumented source code, allow developers to have a better visibility into what was and is being develo ped, helping, for example, the reuse of the code. This s tudy presents a semi-automatic method for documentation of source code from the existing artifacts in a sof tware project under development. The method aims to reduce developer’s workload, allowing them to work on other tasks of the project and/or ensure that th e project deadlines will be met. The method, implemented in a tool, called Comente+, is capable of creating or updating comments into a source code fr om gathered information recovered from the project artifacts. To implement Comente+, we used an information retrieval approach. We performed some experiments with real data to validate this approac h. For that, we created a special measure that esti mates how well documented a source code is.