Steven I. Ross

Jazzing up Eclipse with collaborative tools

Collaboration is an integral part of software development, occurring through tools inside and outside the IDE. This paper presents an overview of the Jazz project, which seeks to integrate collaborative capabilities into the Eclipse IDE, enabling small teams of software developers to work together more productively.

Building Collaboration into IDEs

Software development is rarely a solo coding effort. More often, it is a collaborative process, with teams of developers working together to design solutions and produce quality code. The members of these close-knit teams often look at one another’s code, collectively make plans about how to proceed, and even fix each other’s bugs when necessary. Teamwork does not stop there, however. An extended team may include project managers, testers, architects, designers, writers, and other specialists, as well as other programming teams. Programmers also interact with the community of developers outside their organization to obtain advice, code snippets, and a general understanding of what works and what doesn’t.

Introducing collaboration into an application development environment

We present contextual collaboration, an approach to building collaborative systems that embeds collaborative capabilities into core applications, and discuss its advantages. We describe the Jazz collaborative application development environment that we are using to explore this concept and discuss design guidelines that have emerged from our experience.

Weaving a social fabric into existing software

Contextual collaboration is a promising approach to embedding new collaborative features into existing applications. However, incorporating such new features may be too difficult for applications without extensible frameworks or too complex for legacy, custom, and mission-critical applications. We present Aspect-Oriented Retrofitting as a lightweight approach to embedding contextual collaboration in this class of applications, describe guidelines for designing retrofitting aspects, and walk through two examples.

CHI 2039: speculative research visions

This paper presents a curated collection of fictional abstracts for papers that could appear in the proceedings of the 2039 CHI Conference. It provides an opportunity to consider the various visions guiding work in HCI, the futures toward which we (believe we) are working, and how research in the field might relate with broader social, political, and cultural changes over the next quarter century.

Retrofitting collaboration into UIs with aspects

Mission critical applications and legacy systems may be difficult to revise and rebuild, and yet it is sometimes desirable to retrofit their user interfaces with new collaborative features without modifying and recompiling the original code. We describe the use of Aspect-Oriented Programming as a lightweight technique to accomplish this, present an example of incorporating presence awareness deeply into an applications user interface, and discuss the implications of this technique for developing CSCW software.

Eclipse as a platform for research on interruption management in software development

Automated tools for mediating incoming interruptions are necessary in order to balance the concentration required for software development with the need to collaborate and absorb information. At present, there is no design knowledge for building such tools for programmers. The abundant literature on the general problem of interruptions and awareness does not address the unique characteristics of software development, and the few studies which do are restricted to simplified tasks or environments. We attribute this scarcity to difficulties in conducting empirical studies in real settings, because of the need to implement appropriate research tools.Eclipse is poised as an ideal platform for such research thanks to its popularity, plug-in model, and observation hooks. This paper presents Gate-Keeper, a plug-in based framework for managing interruptions, allowing the rapid implementation of different interruption and awareness models, and their integration within actual collaboration tools. To validate our framework, we implemented a rule-based interruption management system, and integrated it with Jazz, an Eclipse-based collaboration tool.

MoCoMapps: mobile collaborative map-based applications

This video demonstrates an experiment in crowdsourcing both map-based data and also the applications that provide the maps, and also presents scenarios of use.

Crafting an environment for collaborative reasoning

We motivate the need for new environments for collaborative reasoning and describe the foundations of our approach, namely collaboration, semantics, and adaptability. We describe the CRAFT collaborative reasoning interface and infrastructure that we are developing to explore this approach.

A multiple-application conversational agent

In this paper, we describe the rationale behind and architecture of a conversational agent capable of speech enabling multiple applications.