Supporting developers' coordination in the IDE

A Guzzi, Alberto Bacchelli, Yann Riche, Arie Van Deursen

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedings/Edited volumeConference contributionScientificpeer-review

22 Citations (Scopus)
100 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Teamwork in software engineering is time-consuming and problematic. In this paper, we explore how to better support developers' collaboration in teamwork, focusing on the software implementation phase happening in the integrated development environment (IDE). Conducting a qualitative investigation, we learn that developers' teamwork needs mostly regard coordination, rather than concurrent work on the same (sub)task, and that developers successfully deal with scenarios considered problematic in literature, but they have problems dealing with breaking changes made by peers on the same project. We derive implications and recommendations. Based on one of the latter, we analyze the current IDE support for receiving code changes, finding that historical information is neither visible nor easily accessible. Consequently, we devise and qualitatively evaluate BELLEVUE, the design of an IDE extension to make received changes always visible and code history accessible in the editor.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2015 ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Pages518-532
Number of pages15
ISBN (Electronic)9781450329224
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 28 Feb 2015
Event18th ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2015 - BC, Canada
Duration: 14 Mar 201518 Mar 2015

Conference

Conference18th ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2015
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityBC
Period14/03/1518/03/15

Keywords

  • Developers' coordination
  • IDE extension
  • Qualitative study.

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  • CSCW 2015 ACM SIGCHI Best Paper Award

    Guzzi, A (Recipient), Bacchelli, Alberto (Recipient), Riche, Yann (Recipient) & van Deursen, A. (Recipient), 15 Mar 2015

    Prize: Prize (including medals and awards)

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