Supporting Collaboration in Software Development Activities

Abstract

Today, software development is intrinsically a collaborative activity and there is still a crucial need to provide adequate computer tools well supporting collaboration in such activity. Empirical studies have already identified some requirements to provide better collaborationaware software development environments, and theories coming from human and social sciences still help researchers to better understand these activities. Founding our work on the Activity Theory, we present here some important issues that have been identified for creating better software development environments. Adding our experience, we particularly emphasize an aspect of human activity that has still not really been taken into account in creating these computer supports: the user's experience crystallization and sharing. Finally, we propose an implementation supporting the identified properties in an existing and widely used software development environment.

An exploratory classification of applications in the realm of collaborative modeling and design

“…Many authors have discussed that designing is more than a cognitive process and should be perceived as a social process (Lewandowski and Bourguin 2006). The participants of a design process usually adopt social strategies in their actions (Ramires et al 2005).…”

“…Task interdependencies are often understood and explained through the employment of the Activity theory (Lewandowski and Bourguin 2006). Activity theory defines an activity as a central unit for understanding human behavior.…”

“…The main goal of these artifacts is to enhance communication amongst the participants of the design process. However, communication is only a subset of the constituting issues in collaboration (Lewandowski and Bourguin 2006). Falzon (1994) categorizes collaborative design models based on the nature of the shared design goals into distributed design and co-design.…”

Themes in Human Work Interaction Design

“…Software development is intrinsically a collaborative activity. Based on an analysis of current literature and software, Lewandowski and Bourguin 2006 find that current Software Development Environments seldom provide true integrated collaboration between developers, rather they offer only sharing of material or communication support, and do not support the actual work process of software development. Further, the ability to tailor the development environment is an issue, as features for allowing external applications to be nested into the environment are lacking.…”