Virtual Radical Collocation for Distributed Software Development:

Discussion

Walt ScacchiInstitute for Software ResearchUniversity of California, IrvineIrvine, CA 92697-3455 USA

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~wscacchi/Presentations/VRC-DSD.ppt

VRC Proposal, Olson, et al. 2008

Significant concepts and ideas Concerns or opportunities to address Other observations

VRC Proposal: Significant concepts and ideas

Virtual radical collocation When and where VRC based work may be more effective than traditional

collocated work Being there (virtually) without really being there (physically)

Focus on logically centralizing physically decentralized software development actors, work practices, tools, artifacts*

Embodied VRC via Video walls, online social proxies, and 3D virtual workplaces

* J. Noll and W. Scacchi, Supporting Software Development in Virtual Enterprises, Journal of Digital Information, 1(4), February 1999.

VRC Proposal: Significant concepts and ideas

Concerns or opportunities to address

Strengths and weaknesses of large tiled displays Visualization content, tiles, and display resolution (mis)match User engagement: sitting versus dynamic roaming Window-pane border management vs. content layout (e.g., software text, box and

arrow diagrams, networks, and graphs common in software development) Online social proxies

Mixed reality avatars (bots?) that stand-in while people are away Seeing others vs. engaging others (e.g., eye gaze; knowing others see you) Persistent, reusable gestures

3D virtual environments (with real-time interacting avatars and spatial audio)

Networked multi-player games (Half-Life: CounterStrike) do it already, and do it much better than Second Life or others like Miramar (Intel) or Qwaq

Other observations

30+ years of prior empirical studies of software engineering work and productivity

Relevant domain expertise, teamwork practices, and individual differences of developers trump all other cost or productivity factors, up to 10X+

Consider targeting high-value distributed software development people

Software system architects Project managers Critical event response teams Developers of concurrent “multi-core” applications

Other observations

Consider what kinds of distributed software development visualizations and tasks to support Large system architectural configurations Project management via socio-technical interaction networks Cyber attacks (e.g., network security breach localization, isolation,

and repair/reconfiguration) Designing, run-time monitoring, and debugging of “multi-core”

software Anything else that requires or benefits from a massively parallel,

snap-to-grid views or visualizations of software

Source: C. Amrit and van Hillegersberg, J., Detecting Coordination Problems in Collaborative Software Development Environments, Information Systems Management, 25(1), 57,70, December 2008.