Supporting distributed software development through context awareness on software artifacts: the DiSEN-CollaborAR approach

Supporting distributed software development through context awareness on software artifacts: the DiSEN-CollaborAR approach

Rafael Leonardo Vivian ( [email protected] ) – State University of MaringáElisa Hatsue Moriya Huzita ( [email protected] ) – State University of MaringáGislaine Camila Lapasini Leal ( [email protected] ) – State University of MaringáSAC 2013 – 28th Symposium On Applied ComputingCOSYS – Cooperative SystemsCoimbra, Portugal

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● Introduction● Challenges for context awareness on software artifacts● Related works● DiSEN-CollaborAR approach● Implementation● Conclusion and future work

Supporting distributed software development through context awareness on software artifacts: the DiSEN-CollaborAR approach 02

Agenda

● Temporal and geographical distances among the teams● Communication channels are reduced, affecting the

productivity and quality of software development● Software developers need to appropriate tools to support

their work: Version Control System and UML CASE Tools● VCS and UML CASE Tool do not have mechanisms to associate

the software artifacts of different types according to their internal structure

● The circumstances involved in the production or modification of a software artifact


Introduction

● The lack of context awareness on the software artifacts can produce ambiguities during collaborative software development and consequently to faults or uncertainties

● This scenario motivates the development of an infrastructure able to support the dissemination of information about software artifacts

● An approach that provides support for context awareness on software artifacts such as source code and class diagram from collaborative work performed by distributed teams


Introduction

● Challenge #1: Acquire contextual information about the creation and updating of software artifacts from several sources

● Challenge #2: Provide contextual elements, awareness elements and properties of software artifacts that are important to increase the awareness of distributed teams members

● Challenge #3: Present contextual information about the creation and updating of software artifacts through visual resources


Challenges for context awarenesson software artifacts

● ADAMS (de Lucia et al., 2005) is a tool for managing changes to artifacts during the iterative and incremental software development

● EvolTrack (Cepêda et al., 2010) is an approach that supports the awareness on the evolution of software during the development cycle


Related works

de Lucia, A.; Fasano, F.; Francese, R.; Oliveto, R. Traceability management in ADAMS. In: Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Distributed Software Development, 2005, p. 135–149.

Cepêda, R. S. V.; Magdaleno, A. M.; Murta, L. G. P.; Werner, C. M. L. Evoltrack: improving design evolution awareness in Software Development. Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society, v. 16, n. 2, p. 117–131, 2010.


DiSEN-CollaborAR approach

Figure 1. Conceptual model of DiSEN-CollaborAR

● Awareness Elements are information that individuals need to monitor, learn and understand the changes that occurred on software artifacts over time in a collaborative project



Category Element Specific issue-based software artifacts

Who

Presence Who did access this artifact?

Identity Who is the participant that produced or modified this artifact?

Author Who did produce or change this artifact?

What

Action What were changes made on the artifact?

Intention What was the goal of the changes made on the artifact?

Artifact What was the artifact changed?

Where Location Where is the artifact?

HowAction history How did the actions happen on the artifact?

Artifact history How was the artifact changed?

When Event history When was the artifact changed?

● Artifact Context is a set of information, consisting of several contextual elements that characterize the artifact and supporting the individual in performing the tasks



Contextual element Description

File File of the artifact generated by the system

Team Team which the participant is part

Tool Tool used to generate the artifact

Host Repository of the artifact

Location Physical location where the team is

Participant User who manipulated the artifact

Artifact type Indicates the category of artifact

Version Version of the file which corresponds to the artifact



Figure 2: Linking instances from classes of ontologyin the class diagram and source code

● The prototype ACAS (Artifact Collaborative Awareness System) has integration with Mercurial (Version Control System) and with ArgoUML (UML CASE Tool)

● The parser in the source code, in Java format, is performed through Eclipse JDT Core API

● The parser in the code that represents the class diagram, in XMI format, is performed through SAX API

● The DiSEN Agency framework (Monte-Alto et al., 2012) provides support for processing contextual information in the ACAS

● For the manipulation of graphs in the ACAS, it was used the JUNG – Java Universal Network/Graph framework


Implementation

Monte-Alto, H. H. L. C.; Biasao, A. B.; Teixeira, L. O.; Huzita, E. H. M. Multi-agent applications in a context-aware global software development environment. In: Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence (DCAI12), Springer, 2012, p. 265–272.


Implementation

Figure 3. User interface in ACAS

● DiSEN-CollaborAR: - An approach to deal with context awareness on software artifacts for distributed teams

● Motivation for its development:- The reduction of communication about the software artifacts that are produced or updated during collaborative development

● The main contribution: - To provide an approach with resource to capture, represent, storage, process and present contextual information about software artifacts


Conclusion and future work

● This approach:(1) offers awareness elements and artifact context that increase the understanding on the software artifacts, (2) enables the semantic representation from contextual information about software artifacts through an ontology, (3) establishes relationships of dependencies among software artifacts based on ontology, (4) generates links of traceability among software artifacts and (5) presents contextual information through graphs that allow visual awareness

● Future works:(1) explore other information sources such as email, discussion forum and wiki and (2) identify socio-technical networks that can reveal patterns of collaboration that influence the individuals awareness


Conclusion and future work

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Supporting distributed software development through context awareness on software artifacts: the DiSEN-CollaborAR approach





Education

Supporting distributed software development through context awareness on software artifacts: the DiSEN-CollaborAR approach