Group Awareness in Global Software Engineering

1. Group Awareness in Global SoftwareEngineering submitted to: Professor Sherwin Shirmohammadi in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the course ELG 5100 By, Ashok kumar Ramamurthy – 6824350 Sunil Suresh Babu - 6851971

2. Contents: • Introduction • Why is it required? • Types of group awareness • Group awareness in ALM • Future scope • Conclusion • Reference

3. Why is GA required? • Example - Bob and Alice. • Group awareness can improve teams’ trust, relationships, and efficiency. • Awareness is necessary to coordinate group activities and ensure that individual contributions are relevant to the whole group.

4. Types: Informal Group-structural Workspace Group awareness Social

5. Informal awareness: • Check who is around and Communicate either directly or use messenger for instant question resolution. Group structural awareness: • Make sure you understand clearly about your team members responsibilities. • Structured matrices can be used to track the team members responsibilities and commitments

6. Workspace awareness : • Make sure who is working on which module within the workspace. Social awareness: • All the members of the group should have the responsibility to stimulate social connection within the group. • Group members can connect and collaborate on personal levels.

7. Group awareness in ALM: Application life cycle management - continuous process of managing an application’s life cycle. • By providing a project workspace with an integrated tool set encapsulating all software development activities. • Such as - requirements management, design, coding, testing, tracking and release management. • Most of ALM platforms are web applications except for IBM Jazz and Microsoft team foundation server. • Most of ALM platforms lack social awareness support altogether or doesn’t provide adequate support.

8. ALM Platforms:TRAC: • Minimalistic approach to project lifecycle management. • It combines an integrated wiki, an issue tracking system and a front-end interface to a Subversion source code management system. • With the help of plug-ins it provides other features like email messages and RSS feeds. • Group-awareness features support workspace awareness by providing notifications of project events and changes. • Trac only allows project administrators to manage developers’ privileges to view, create, modify, and delete artifacts.

9. Google Code: • Hosted service can’t be extended using plug-ins. • Supports • Workplace awareness – email and RSS notifications. • Structural awareness – by managing permissions. • Google Code doesn’t support social or informal awareness.

10. Assembla: • Web based platform – hosting open source and commercial software. • Supports: • Group-structural awareness – Agile development process for running scrum meetings. Helps project manager to define teams and roles. • Workspace awareness – Notifications available through email, twitter and RSS. • Synchronous communication via instant messaging over Extendible messaging and presence protocol (XMPP). • Doesn't support Social awareness.

11. Jazz: • Two clients: • Web application – Project management.. • Desktop application – Rational team concert built on Eclipse Rich client platform. • Supports: • Workspace – email notification and RSS reader natively build in RTC. • GS - Provides complete process and team management features. • Informal – By integrating with Lotus Sametime, Google talk, Skype and instant messaging networks. • Social – By integration of IBM connection suite (dynamic).

12. Team foundation server: • Microsoft ALM platform. • Contains: • lightweight web client for management tasks. • Rich client desktop for development oriented tasks known has Team Explorer. • Support: • Similar to IBM Jazz. • Informal awareness – Microsoft, Lync and Skype networks using plug-ins. • Lacks social awareness.

13. CodePlex: • Customized public TFS installation that Microsoft provides to host open source projects. • Ability to connect to Visual basic – peculiar among web based platforms.

14. GitHub: • Platform built on Git as the source code management system for both open source and commercial software projects. • Supports - group structural and workspace awareness. • GitHub – “Social network for programmers” • Twitter like approach, helps to follow projects using “@mentions”.

16. Case Study: • A Typical GSE Scenario. • Without social awareness support. • With social awareness support.

17. Future Scope • Application Life-cycle Management (ALM) lack social awareness . • Jazz and GitHub, provide support that isn’t adequate for other forms of group awareness. • To overcome this inadequacy, Microsoft research engineering is developing an add on for visual studio called SocialTFS • SocialTFS aggregates teammates’ content from popular social networks into the developer’s workspace.

18. Conclusion: • In this paper we have presented the tools that augments ALM platforms by aggregating content from multiple social media into the developer’s workspace. • The comparison chart shows that tools must be developed to create social awareness in the workspace, which we have included in our future work.

19. Reference: • Filippo Lanubile, Fabio Calefato, and Christof Ebert. “Group Awareness in Global Software Engineering”. • Fabio Calefato, Filippo Lanubile, University of Bari Dipartimento di Informatica, Bari, Italy “SocialCDE: A Social Awareness Tool for Global Software Teams” • C. Ebert, Global Software and IT: A Guide to Distributed Development, Projects and Outsourcing, Wiley,2012.

20. Questions!!! Thank you!!!