Detecting Coordination Problems in Collaborative Software Development Environments

Software development is rarely an individual effort and generally involves teams of developers collaborating to generate good reliable code. Among the software code there exist technical dependencies that arise from software components using services from other components. The different ways of assigning the design, development, and testing of these software modules to people can cause various coordination problems among them. We claim that the collaboration of the developers, designers and testers must be related to and governed by the technical task structure. These collaboration practices are handled in what we call Socio-Technical Patterns.

The TESNA project (Technical Social Network Analysis) we report on in this paper addresses this issue. We propose a method and a tool that a project manager can use in order to detect the socio-technical coordination problems. We test the method and tool in a case study of a small and innovative software product company.     

Supporting Software Development With Roles

Software development tools are very important in software engineering. Although roles have been acknowledged and applied for many years in several areas related to software engineering, there is a lack of research on software development tools based on roles. Most significantly, there is no complete and consistent consideration of roles in all the phases of software development. Considering the increasing importance and applications of roles in software development, this paper intends to discuss the importance of roles in software engineering and that of role-based software development; review the literature relevant to role mechanisms in software engineering; propose and describe a role-based software process; and implement a prototype tool for developing complex software systems with the help of role mechanisms     

Risk Management for Collaborative Software Development

Collaborative software development involving multiple organizational units, often spanning national, language, and cultural boundaries, raises new challenges and risks that can derail software development projects even when traditional risk factors are being controlled. This article presents a framework that can be used to manage collaborative software development projects, based on an extended set of risk management principles. Three risk factors — trust, culture, and collaborative communication — are discussed in depth.     

面向协作的软件开发环境及其构造方法

针对现有软件开发环境中,工具集成缺乏灵活的过程逻辑,开发者、工具、制品数据之间关系割裂的问题,提出了一种新的面向协作的软件开发环境—软件生产线,以及一种构造软件生产线的方法-软件生产线框架,详细阐述了软件生产线框架的组成部分,并给出了软件生产线的构造和使用方法。应用案例表明,软件生产线框架能够加快软件开发环境的构造,并...     

Collaborative Problem Solving and Groupware for Software Development

When a group is working together toward a common goal, communication and collaboration are key. This is especially true in software development where a project of any significance involves groups of people. Collaborative problem-solving techniques and groupware technology can be a boon to software development because they enhance communication and cooperation. This article examines how software development is affected by collaborative problem solving and decision making, groupware theory and tools, and group cognition and psychology. It also analyzes collaboration tools and their correlation to problem solving and group characteristics.     

基于软件开发过程的软件缺陷管理研究

分析了软件缺陷管理的理论、方法及业务流程,指出了传统软件缺陷管理模式的不足。在此基础上提出了基于软件开发过程的软件缺陷管理模式,此模型在考虑测试者、开发者和评审者的基础上依据软件生命周期各阶段对缺陷进行了管理。最后对此管理模型的业务流程进行了详细的分析及应用,指出此管理模式很好的达到了尽早发现、预防与排除缺陷,改进软件过程的目的。     

Meetings of the Board: The Impact of Scheduling Medium on Long Term Group Coordination in Software Development

Despite a wealth of electronic group tools for coordinating the software development process, instead we find technologically adept groups preferring to use what seem to be outmoded material tools in critical projects. The current ethnographic study investigates this apparent paradox. We begin by building up a detailed picture of the overall software development process and identify critical general problems in achieving coordination. Coordination problems arise in software development not only because of the complex dependencies that hold among the work of different individuals, but also for social and motivational reasons. We identify the central role of the schedule as a coordination device, but find that its value can be undermined because the schedule is often neither accurate, current nor credible. As a result, the schedule is not used as a resource for individual or group planning. We then compare coordination in two development groups, one using electronic and the other material scheduling tools. We found that the medium of the schedule has a major impact on coordination problems. The size, public location and physical qualities of material tools engender certain crucial group processes that current electronic technologies fail to support. A large wallboard located in a public area encouraged greater responsibility, commitment and updating and its material properties served to encourage more reflective planning. As a result the wallboard schedule was both accurate and current. Furthermore, the public nature of the wallboard promoted group interaction around the board, it enabled collaborative problem solving, as well as informing individuals about the local and global progress of the project. Despite these benefits, however, the material tool fell short on several other dimensions such as distribution, complex dependency tracking, and versioning. We make design recommendations about how the benefits of material tools could be incorporated into electronic groupware systems and discuss the theoretical implications of this work.     

Using Developer Activity Data to Enhance Awareness during Collaborative Software Development

Software development is a global activity unconstrained by the bounds of time and space. A major effect of this increasing scale and distribution is that the shared understanding that developers previously acquired by formal and informal face-to-face meetings is difficult to obtain. This paper proposes a shared awareness model that uses information gathered automatically from developer IDE interactions to make explicit orderings of tasks, artefacts and developers that are relevant to particular work contexts in collaborative, and potentially distributed, software development projects. The research findings suggest that such a model can be used to: identify entities (developers, tasks, artefacts) most associated with a particular work context in a software development project; identify relevance relationships amongst tasks, developers and artefacts e.g. which developers and artefacts are currently most relevant to a task or which developers have contributed to a task over time; and, can be used to identify potential bottlenecks in a project through a ‘social graph’ view. Furthermore, this awareness information is captured and provided as developers work in different locations and at different times.     

基于协同产品商务工具的分析与评述

产品协同商务(CPC)是21世纪90年代后期出现的一类新的企业管理解决方案。它充分利用WEB技术,增强企业与企业之间协作能力,企业和它的合作伙伴可以在任意时间任意地点共享产品设计和信息,缩短产品设计周期,更好地交流设计思想以提高产品质量。制造商可以在更短的时间内,以更个性化的服务,更低的成本,更少的缺陷制造出更好的产品。文章分析了世界主流协同产品商务工具的功能与不足,并针对中国企业的状况提出了一种解决方案。     

Win32API在过程实验平台开发中的应用

为方便对复杂工业过程的建模与控制研究,开发了过程实验平台。平台运行时由在Visual C 环境下编译链接的仿真服务器进程与在Visual Basic环境下编译生成的仿真操作站进程组成,仿真服务器承担计算任务,仿真操作站是数据显示与用户操作界面。仿真操作站定时从仿真服务器接收过程数据,并把用户操作实时发送到服务器。为实现不同开发环境下的进程间通讯,使用了管道函数、进程函数等Win32 API函数。该文介绍实验平台的设计思想与主要实现技术,并给出部分调用函数的具体形式。     

论大型软件开发

为何大型软件开发失败率高 ?当前软件工程理论是否存在一些缺陷 ?对大型软件的认识是否存在误区 ?结合作者的信息系统开发经验 ,旨在分析和研究软件工程的理论性问题 ,并提出一些观点和方法 ,探索开发大型软件的成功之道。     

论软件开发的角色设计

系统应该为什么人而设计，如何定好软件设计的目标，这是本文所探讨的问题。     

论软件开发的角色设计

系统应该为什么人而设计,如何定好软件设计的目标,这是本文所探讨的问题。     

基于敏捷软件开发的软件工程教学研究

讨论了当前软件工程存在的问题和敏捷软件开发对相应问题的解决方法;针对软件工程在教学中遇到的问题,提出了基于敏捷软件开发组织教学内容和教学实践的方法,并分析了这种方法的优点。     

敏捷开发方法在游戏软件开发中的应用

敏捷软件开发是一种相对传统软件开发方法而言的轻型方法,强调以人为本,尽可能少的约束开人员,利于发挥开发人员的的创造性,也是提高软件质量的根本。开发人员必须遵循敏捷开发实践,提高自身水平,游戏软件的开发是进行实践的好方式,本文以五子棋游戏开发为例,给出敏捷开发的一些关键实践,需求的敏捷获取、代码的重构及测试驱动等响应需求变化的敏捷开发方法。     

软件项目开发的性能优化

针对中小型软件开发项目的性能要求进行设计优化,其中包括了实时性的设计优化、软件结构模型的设计优化和软件可维护性的设计优化等等.对于这些设计优化思想,给出了一些相关的实例说明.在软件开发过程中,通过对这些设计优化思想的把握,不仅可以很好的满足软件的基本设计需求,而且可以大大增强软件产品的质量,同时可以有效的减少软件开发过程中的工作量.     

软件工程技术在系统软件开发过程的应用

近年来,计算机技术发展迅速,与之相应的软件设计、硬件安装也得到了极大的发展。计算机技术及其相关技术在社会各领域的应用,取得了显著的成效。在计算机发展中,计算机系统软件工程作为核心内容,一直以来被广大计算机科研者高度关注。笔者首先分析了传统软件应用程序与开发,其次深入分析了软件工程技术,最后对软件工程技术在系统软件开发过程的应用进行了探讨。     

软件开发中的C#

C#由Microsoft设计,为.NET量身定做,具备Visual Basic的简单易用性以及C++/C的巨大功能,也是第一个组件导向(Component-oriented)的程序语言,与C++与Java一样亦为对象导向(object-oriented)程序语言。同时,C#具有很多独有的特点。     

A Prototype Software Framework for Internet-Enabled Collaborative Development of a Structural Analysis Program

. This paper describes a prototype implementation of a software platform that enables the utilization and collaborative development of structural analysis programs, taking advantage of the Internet and web-based technologies. The new platform would allow users to have easy access to the structural analysis platform via the Internet. Users can have direct access to the analysis program and the analysis results by using a web-browser or other application programs, such as MATLAB. Furthermore, the platform is intended to serve as a common finite element structural analysis tool for which researchers and users can build, test, and incorporate new developments. Researchers and developers can link the analysis platform with their developments by utilizing pre-defined Internet-enabled communication interfaces. The prototype system is applied to perform a nonlinear dynamic analysis for a two-dimensional frame structure. It is shown that the Internet-enabled collaborative paradigm can potentially provide greater flexibility and extendibility than traditional structural analysis programs, which are typically packaged individually.     

中国软件学院国际合作项目类型探析（英文）

在全球化和软件行业需求的双重影响下,中国的软件学院与国外高校开展了形式多样的国际合作项目,包括体验式项目、学位项目以及联合合作项目。文章分析各类国际合作项目的特点,并根据这些特点探索出适合中国软件学院开展国际合作项目的方法。