Supporting distributed software development through context awareness on software artifacts

Abstract

Source code and class diagram are artifacts produced or updated during software development. However, when the scenario in which teams are distributed is considered, the temporal and geographical distances among individuals affect communication, creating inconsistencies and ambiguities about the software artifacts. These problems can be minimized by sharing contextual information of actions that occur on cooperation objects. This paper presents the DiSEN-CollaborAR, an approach to deal with context awareness on software artifacts. It provides resources to communicate what individuals have done over the software artifacts. This is possible by capturing contextual information that is represented, stored, processed and displayed. So, awareness elements, artifact context and traceability among software artifacts contribute to increase the understanding of the software artifacts and also the collaboration among distributed teams.

Improving Coordination and Communication in Distributed Software Development through Context-Based Software Artifacts Awareness: A Controlled Experiment

“…The contextual information captured from software artifacts are represented, stored, processed and presented for individuals. This section briefly presents the approach, whose details can be found in (Vivian et al, 2013).…”

“…The different kinds of software artifacts such as source code and class diagram have structures and distinct forms. In addition, both VCS and UML CASE tools no have mechanisms to associate the software artifacts of different kinds according to their internal structure (Vivian et al, 2013). For example, when a source code is changed, the individual has no knowledge about the artifacts, both the source code as the class diagram, which can be impacted or be related to its activity.…”

“…Another issue, relates to the circumstances involved in the production or modification of software artifacts (Vivian et al, 2013). Sometimes it is important know the user that manipulated an artifact, the tool used or the date when the event happened.…”

“…The above described scenario motivated the development of an infrastructure able to support the dissemination of information concerning software artifacts. Thus, to support the context awareness of software artifacts, Vivian et al (2013) proposed an approach that provides resources to capture contextual information from shared repositories and, based on contextual information captured and processed, it generates relationships dependencies among software artifacts, to then, be displayed. The proposed approach aims to help distributed teams to develop activities carried out by its members with respect to the software artifacts that are produced and/or changed.…”

“…This paper presents an experimental study to evaluate the feasibility of an approach developed by Vivian et al (2013) to support the context awareness about software artifacts in distributed software development. During the experimental study, participants used two approaches.…”