Tesseract: Interactive Environment for Exploration of Project Relationships

Abstrac

Using Development Experience to Calculate Congruence

Coordination congruence has been defined as the match between coordination requirements and the actual coordination behavior of a team, where requirements are calculated based on underlying task dependencies and behavior based on communication patterns. In this paper we propose to expand the notion of congruence in two distinct ways. First, we use the concept of shared mental model as a determinant of coordination behavior, where shared mental model is defined as the common conceptualization of artifacts, tasks, and team members shared among developers who have worked together in the past. Second, we create a measure of expertise congruence that determines the match between the expertise that is required and that which is allocated to a project. We also present some issues that need careful investigation as we expand the notion of congruence. This effort is partially funded by the National Science Foundation under grant number IIS-0329090, and the Software Industry Center and its sponsors, particularly the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Effort also supported by a 2007 Jazz Faculty Grant. The views and conclusions ar

A social network approach to free/open source software simulation

Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) development is a complex process that is just beginning to be understood. The actual development process is frequently characterized as disparate volunteer developers collaborating to make a piece of software. The developers of F/OSS, like all software, spend a significant portion of their time in social communications to foster collaboration. We have analyzed several methods of communication; a social networking site, project mailing lists, and developer weblogs; to gain an understanding of the social network structure behind F/OSS projects. This social network data was used to create a model of F/OSS development that allows for multiple projects, users, and developers with varying goals and socialization methods. Using this model we have been able to replicate some of the known phenomena observed in F/OSS and provide a first step in the creation of a robust model of F/OSS

Simplifying cyber foraging for mobile devices

Cyber foraging is the transient and opportunistic use of compute servers by mobile devices. The short market life of such devices makes rapid modification of applications for remote execution an important problem. We describe a solution that combines a “little language ” for cyber foraging with an adaptive runtime system. We report results from a user study showing that even novice developers are able to successfully modify large, unfamiliar applications in just a few hours. We also show that the quality of novice-modified and expert-modified applications are comparable in most cases