TeamWATCH: Visualizing development activities using a 3-D city metaphor to improve conflict detection and team awareness

Abstract

The awareness of others’ activities has been widely recognized as essential in facilitating coordination in a team among Computer-Supported Cooperative Work communities. Several field studies of software developers in large software companies such as Microsoft have shown that coworker and artifact awareness are the most common information needs for software developers; however, they are also two of the seven most frequently unsatisfied information needs. To address this problem, we built a workspace awareness tool named TeamWATCH to visualize developer activities using a 3-D city metaphor. In this paper, we discuss the importance of awareness in software development, review existing workspace awareness tools, present the design and implementation of TeamWATCH, and evaluate how it could help detect and resolve conflicts earlier and better maintain group awareness via a controlled experiment. The experimental results showed that the subjects using TeamWATCH performed significantly better with respect to early conflict detection and resolution.

Unpacking the Role of Feedback in Virtual Team Effectiveness

“…(d) Second Life representation of team members’ activities on specific tasks. From “TeamWATCH: Visualizing development activities using a 3-D city metaphor to improve conflict detection and team awareness,” by Ye et al (2018). Copyright 2018 Ye et al…”

“…We found 29 studies drawing only on objective feedback sources. Objective feedback was presented in form of (1) node graphs (typically employed in social network analysis to depict the structure of team interactions; e.g., Gutwin & Greenberg, 1999; Janssen et al, 2011); (2) icons giving information on team members’ attributes and behaviors, such as time allocation to the team project (Romero et al, 2009), responsiveness to emails (Trainer & Redmiles, 2018), and files currently worked on (Ye et al, 2018, see Figure 3d); or (3) displays of team members’ contributions (e.g., Michinov & Primois, 2005; Ostrander et al, 2020). Two-thirds of these studies were conducted in the lab ( k = 20).…”

“…Nearly all these studies reported partially positive ( k = 14, +) or positive ( k = 11, ++) effects on measured outcome variables. Many studies reported positive effects of objective feedback on team performance (such as the number and quality of generated ideas, e.g., Jung et al, 2010; Michinov & Primois, 2005), followed by positive effects for objective feedback on team processes (e.g., participation, Castro-Hernandez et al, 2014; Martino et al, 2009) or team emergent states, such as group awareness (Janssen et al, 2011; Ye et al, 2018).…”

Spontaneous Utilization: A Classic Grounded Theory of Utilizing Ambient Displays in Professional, Large-Scale Agile Software Development Environments

“…Large displays are a common means to convey information in shared software development workspaces (Ye, Ye, & Liu, 2018). For example, Biehl, Czerwinski, Smith, and Robertson (2007) and Jakobsen et al (2009) use teamwork awareness tools in the form of large wall projections.…”

Educational Model Study to Train and Develop Competitive Workers, Based on Learning Objectives

“…Compared to the training efforts that focus on improving the short term, the development of activities that are intended to enhance the competence for the long term as the anticipation over the needs of the company in the come (Ye, Ye, & Liu, 2018). Development activities can improve the performance in the work of someone, but that is not its primary goal (Bauerle et al, 2016).…”