Towards Computer-Supported Collaborative Software Engineering

Carl Cook, PhD Student

Dept. CSSE, University of Canterbury

Tue Feb 27 10:00:00 NZDT 2007 in Room 031, MSCS

Abstract

Software engineering is a fundamentally collaborative activity. Mainstream tools to support software engineering, however, are designed primarily for single users. There are many foreseen benefits in using tools that support real-time collaboration between software engineers, and to this end, numerous approaches to support collaborative software engineering (CSE) have been trialed over the last two decades.

My Ph.D. was motivated by the need to progress CSE prototypes of limited scope and purpose to provably useful and practical SE tools. This involved identifying common patterns of activity within teams of software engineers and determining requirements that tractable CSE tools should possess. A framework, 'CAISE', was then designed to support such tools, with services including real-time semantic analysis of code changes, multiple views of software artifacts, and CSCW support.

In this seminar I will provide a brief tour of my Ph.D. thesis. After discussing background material and previous approaches, I will present the 'CAISE' framework, and demonstrate various types of CSE tools that can be developed within CAISE. I will then discuss evaluation of the research approach, including empirical user trials and performance analysis, before detailing directions for future work and research.