1. Virtual Radical Collocation for Distributed Software Development: Discussion Walt Scacchi Institute for Software Research University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA 92697-3455 USA http://www.ics.uci.edu/~wscacchi/Presentations/VRC-DSD.ppt

2. VRC Proposal, Olson, et al. 2008 Significant concepts and ideas Concerns or opportunities to address Other observations

3. 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.

4. VRC Proposal: Significant concepts and ideas

5. 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

9. 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

10. 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

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