A Middleware to Increase Awareness in Distributed Software Development Workspaces Copyright, 1997 © Dale Carnegie & Associates, Inc. Marco A. S. Mangan 1,2, Marcos R. S. Borges 3,Cláudia Werner 1 1 Computer Science Department, COPPE, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro – Brazil 2 Faculdade de Informática, PUCRS – Brazil 3 Núcleo de Computação Eletrônica and Instituto de Matemática, UFRJ, Brazil {mangan,

2 Outline  Scenario, Motivation, and Proposal  Middleware Architecture Overview  Examples of Extensions  Conclusion and Future Work

3 Scenario  Distributed or Global Software Development Teammates in different places or worktime Virtual teams In theory: increased productivity In practice: cultural problems, awareness and communication breakdown  Distributed Sofware Development Environments (DSDEs) Software development tools + collaboration tools Examples: Palantir, Milos, Tukan, Gossip, Serendipity

4 Motivation  Problems with current groupware frameworks and toolkits Hard to learn and to extend Single solution provider Offer collaboration support but require task support programming Centralized computing  Economics of software development: software reuse DSDE commonalities and variabilities

5 Proposal  An alternative to DSDE development  Enhancement of pre-existent software tools  A middleware-based collaboration server implementing DSDE commonalities  Extension mechanisms to deal with DSDE variabilities  Guidelines to develop and maintain extensions

6 Middleware architecture  A description of the main components of a DSDE CASE tool: an event source Collector: a program to collect events (Collaborative) Extension: an event sinker  Blackboard architecture Communication uses a single shared space On-line notification Template-based queries A JINI service

7 Middleware architecture  Events: operations + awareness model elements Examples: create class, update line, window move  At least, five basic operations Create, retrieve, update, delete, view/touch  At least, three awareness models Spatial: windows, viewports, UI components Semantic: class, packages, relationships Document-based: document, paragraphs, lines  The task determines the awareness model  API contains about 15 interfaces

8 Middleware architecture CASE tool Collector Extension Collector CASE tool Extension Event Notification e2[e1] write(e2[e1]) e1 query(e?) notify(e?)

9 Examples Task: software peer review CASE tool: Odyssey SDE Collector: Java UI System Spatial awareness model Task: concurrent programming CASE tool: Eclipse SDE Collector: tool extension mechanism Document-based awareness model

10 Examples Task: concurrent modeling CASE tool: Odyssey SDE Collector: tool extension mechanism Semantic awareness model Task: software management CASE tool: Odyssey SDE Collector: persistence layer Semantic awareness model

11 Conclusions  An alternative to the development of DSDEs Distributed computing, application independent awareness model and a software component market  Extension examples demonstrate the feasibility of this approach  Extensions enables the use and evaluation of collaboration support in real scenarios

12 Future Work  Third-party feasibility evaluation Observe planning and development of extensions with the architecture  Work impact evaluation Observe a group performing a development task with and without the extensions

13 Thank you! Comments? Questions? A Middleware to Increase Awareness in Distributed Software Development Workspaces