Side-by-Side Project Awareness - Exploring Multi-Monitor Environments

This research explores how software development tools should be (re)designed to take advantage of this extra display space. Our particular focus is on awareness - using the extra display space to inform developers of relevant activities and situations in the project. To date, awareness information had to be shared through small, often iconic enhancements to the primary development tool, so not to take away valuable space from the primary task of actually writing code. By leveraging the extra display space, entirely different kinds of tools can be created that support the developer in more readily understanding project context and more effectively performing the task at hand.

We are currently investigating three prototype software tools in this context.

• Lighthouse provides a side-by-side view of code on the one hand and the emerging design on the other hand. The emerging design is the design as it resides in the code, i.e., as it is implemented; it may consequently deviate from any conceptual design that was imagined beforehand. Lighthouse annotates the emerging design with awareness information as to which developers are making which changes, providing a view of ongoing parallel work and where conflicts may arise. Pictures of the Lighthouse interface can be found here and here, and more information on the Lighthouse project web site.
• World View provides a location-oriented view of a software development project. It is built on Google Maps, and allows project managers and developers to see the inter-team relationships in a global project. A particular focus, again, is on visualizing conflicts, though future work includes other kinds of dependencies. A picture of the World View interface can be found here, here, and here, and more information will be forthcoming on a future World View project web site.
• Workspace Activity Viewer provides a scalable view of all ongoing parallel development activities in a project. Particular, Workspace Activity Viewer highlights ongoing changes to all artifacts in all workspaces on a six-screen tiled display. The Workspace Activity Viewer operates in 3D to illustrate recency of changes, uses dimensions to indicate the size of changes, and provides various filters to examine aspects of workspace activities in more detail. Some movies of Workspace Activity Viewer in action can be found here, here, here and here, and in the paper listed below. A project web site is forthcoming.

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