Supporting Collaboration Awareness with Real-Time Visualization of Development Activity

Abstract

In the context of multi-developer projects, where several people are contributing code, developers must deal with concurrent development. Collaboration among developers assumes a fundamental role, and failing to address it can result, for example, in shipping delays. We argue that tool support for collaborative software development augments the level of awareness of developers, and consequently, help them to collaborate and coordinate their activities. In this context, we present an approach to augment awareness by recovering development information in real time and broadcasting it to developers in the form of three lightweight visualizations. Scamp, the Eclipse plug-in supporting this, is part of our Syde tool to support collaboration. We illustrate the usage of Scamp in the context of two multi-developer projects.