ICSE

We have developed software tools that aim to support the cooperative software engineering tasks and promote an awareness of social dependencies that is essential to successful coordination. The tools share common characteristics that can be traced back ...

In this paper, we present the work of a research team at the University of Limerick, Ireland, focusing on work practices in a distributed software development environment. Adopting ethnographically-informed methods, the researchers have observed the ...

In this paper we report on a preliminary study of usability information sharing in interactive system development. The study was conducted at a large technology company in the United States. The purpose of the study was to understand the usability ...

This paper provides an overview and position statement on the work undertaken as part of a project to explore the implementation of Scrum in the context of an interactive digital media software development company. The project is being undertaken in the ...

Large-scale software development requires coordination within and between very large engineering teams, each of which may be located in different locations and time zones. Numerous studies, and indeed, a whole conference (ICGSE), are dedicated to ...

The paper describes coordination practices of small and medium enterprises (SME) that outsourced parts of their software development to offshore vendors. Our case study in a German company shows that the geographic distribution of knowledge and ...

This study seeks to shed light on how communication patterns in geographically distributed software development (GDSD) projects evolve over time and how they relate to developers' contributions to the development effort. Data from two GDSD projects from ...

Conducting controlled experiments about programming activities often requires the use of multiple tasks of similar difficulty. In previously reported work about a controlled experiment investigating software exploration tools, we tried to select two ...

Developers need better knowledge tools to answer their information needs, rather than continuing to rely so heavily on communication with coworkers. Web sites, like the social bookmarking site Del.icio.us, might provide a way forward. They are designed ...

More and more software systems are developed by customizing a standard product that provide the major part of the functionality. The customization of Enterprise Resource Planning systems is such a product based software development practice. Little ...

This position paper describes the requirements for facing essential problems of virtual teams. Further, the current deficits of project management tools and collaborative tools are focused. We will describe our opinions on how to solve these problems.

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In this paper we present a new variation of cultural probes, called Infrastructure Probes (IP). IPs can be seen as an additional ethnographic method to get a deeper understanding of the user's working context and thus help to improve the collaboration ...

Even though software is developed by humans, research in software engineering primarily focuses on the technologies, methods and processes they use while disregarding the importance of the humans themselves. In this paper we argue that most studies in ...

Models become increasingly important for software development processes. Though there is a multitude of software modeling tools available, the handling of diagrams is still difficult. To overcome these problems we propose the usage of novel ...

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 ...

Maintaining a developer's awareness of changes in the software on which she depends is challenging. Awareness is often impeded at two ends of the spectrum: a lack of information, when the changes only become apparent when a build breaks or bugs appear; ...

In this study, we explore whether the degree of centrality, betweenness and density of the open source software or OSS team communications network have any bearing on the quality of the software developed. We measure the quality of OSS in terms of ...

The visualizations of the Whyline are presented, which focus on supporting the exploration a source code and how it executes. The visualization is concise, simple to navigate, and mimics syntactic features of its target programming language for ...

The earlier in the software process a fault is detected, the cheaper the cost of fixing the fault. Automated fault detection tools can provide developers with information throughout development, however, programming is a cognitively complex process and ...

Enabling effective coordination of work in large distributed software projects requires cooperation between participants across multiple teams, sites, and skill sets. To determine how practicing software engineers, in a distributed software development ...

Software development is heavily dependent on the participants of the process and their roles within the process. Each developer has his specific skills and interests and hence contributes to the project in a different way. While some programmers work on ...

Determining responsibility for a piece of source code is difficult when software is being developed collaboratively with weak code ownership. Nonetheless, a major factor for preventing "cowboy coding" and careless development of code is liability. We ...

In some software development contexts, understanding 'who else' to report usability results to and how this must be done has a larger impact on the usability of products, in the long run, than reporting results to designers and developers in planned and ...

Substantial effort in the development of any large system is invested in testing. Studies of testing tend to be either technical or concerned with the cognitive ability of testers. Our experience is that testing is not technical but socio-technical, ...

As programmers work on source code, they ask an array of questions that are difficult to answer manually. To help answer these questions, programmers often employ software tools; often in attempting to use these tools, the programmers encounter many ...

Making a change to a large software system requires investing time in understanding the system first. In the context of programming, navigation refers to the process of finding one's way through a complex network of programming constructs and other ...

In this paper we discuss how the cooperation between developers and operations staff is practiced. We have analyzed data collected from a focus group of experienced software engineers and project managers, as well as interviews from two case studies. ...

Because the knowledge required for the construction of a complex software system is often widely distributed among its members, programmers routinely engage in collaboration with each other to acquire knowledge resided in the heads of their peers to ...