TEAM System

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TEAM System
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The need for TEAM system

• Software development is a collective, complex,
  and creative effort
• Usually, developers rely on personal knowledge
  and experience, on their gut feeling
• But as software development projects grow larger,
  it becomes a group activity where individuals
  need to communicate and coordinate
• Individual knowledge has to be shared and
  leveraged at a project and organization level

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What is the TEAM system?

• The goal of the TEAM project is to develop a
  knowledge management system that supports
  software developers in coding activities
• The TEAM system makes a contribution to the
  solution of concrete problems in coding, namely
  error handling and component reuse
• It enables distributed teams to become more
  effective by reusing/learning from each others
  experiences

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What is the TEAM system?

• The real power of the TEAM system lies in
  supporting the whole knowledge management process
• TEAM can be considered as integrated collection
  of services that facilitate software development
  activities by
• capturing
• storing
• disseminating
• reusing knowledge
• created during software development

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Knowledge Management Cycle
Probst et al.
The general purpose of KM is to make knowledge
usable for more than one individual, e.g. for an
organisation as a whole that is, to share it
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Knowledge Goals

• Knowledge goals point the way for knowledge
  management activities
• The building block deals with the creation of a
  knowledge-sensitive corporate culture, in which
  sharing and development of know-how create the
  preconditions for effective knowledge management
• It also ensures that knowledge goals will be
  translated into action

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Knowledge Goals in TEAM

• Based on the as-is analysis and the input
  provided by the industrial partners, it was
  decided that the TEAM project will support two
  areas
• error-handling
• re-use of components
• This has been done by
• exploiting and integrating existing information
  and collecting new knowledge
• providing easy, rapid access to distributed
  knowledge
• eliminating time and space constraints in
  communications through automatic provision of
  knowledge relevant for a given user context
• stimulating people to share knowledge and to use
  shared knowledge

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Knowledge Goals in TEAM

• To gain developer acceptance, the TEAM system has
  been integrated into the software development
  process
• This allows collecting and storing relevant
  knowledge as it is generated in the work
• The main advantage of integrating TEAM into an
  IDE is that KM is put into software engineers
  work
• Coding activities occur inside the computational
  environment rather than in the external world
• While TEAM develops a general framework for
  knowledge-sharing in IDEs, its prototype
  implementation has been done for the Eclipse IDE

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TEAM in Eclipse

• With TEAM system tightly integrated into Eclipse
  development environment, it is easier for
  software developers to create, use, share, etc.
  knowledge
• Its actions, menus and preferences are located in
  the respective locations within the working
  environment
• Several buttons in Toolbar
• TeamWeaver menu in the Eclipse menu
• Eclipse Preferences dialog
• Eclipse Search dialog
• Eclipse Help

DEMO! Installation process.avi
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Knowledge Identification

• Knowledge is information combined with
  experience, context interpretation and reflection
• It is a high-value form of information that is
  ready to be applied in decisions and actions
• Knowledge management seeks to turn data into
  information, and information into knowledge
• Formal knowledge can be expressed in a structured
  form, and easily communicated and shared
• E.g. software engineering methods, document
  templates, components, software artefacts
• Informal knowledge is highly personal and hard to
  formalize, making it difficult to share with
  others
• E.g. lessons learned that are gained as a result
  of the work of the organization itself and that
  describe both successful reports and problems

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Knowledge Identification in TEAM

• Knowledge management requires both a shared
  language and a good fit with concepts that
  already exist in the organization
• TEAM ontologies define the shared vocabulary that
  are used to facilitate annotation, communication,
  search, storage, and representation of
  information
• Knowledge artefacts are interlinked, combined and
  referenced
• TEAM ontologies constitute the glue that binds
  the TEAM components together

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Initial TEAM Ontologies
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Refinement of TEAM Ontologies

• Methodology used
• Comparison of TEAM Ontologies with gold
  standard ontologies from the bibliography
• Evaluation through their useage and feedback from
  end-users
• Refinement and tests for correctness and logical
  consistency

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Refinement of TEAM Ontologies

• Annotation Ontology
• Several classes were imported to support the
  annotation process
• Refinement done in existing classes in order to
  be aligned with the new annotation hierarchy

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Refinement of TEAM Ontologies

• Knowledge Artefact Ontology
• Renamed as Artefact
• A major refinement was performed in order to
  align it with the Interaction Ontology

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Refinement of TEAM Ontologies

• Problem Solution Ontology
• A number of classes were inserted following
  end-user feedback
• Additional Properties were also defined

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Refinement of TEAM Ontologies

• Interaction Ontology
• Refinement lead to a more extended, rich taxonomy
  in both general (Read, Change, etc) as well as SW
  development interactions (InvocateMethod,
  changeParameter, etc.)

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Refinement of TEAM Ontologies

• Organisation Ontology
• Classes added to represent clearly the
  organisation structure of end-users

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Refinement of TEAM Ontologies

• Ontologies produced by the TEAM capture the
  concepts and the definitions as understood by a
  variety of diverse end-users and experts
• Ontology creation and refinement is a rather
  time-consuming, error-prone procedure.
• There is no panacea, not a single method to
  evaluate and refine an ontology but a combination
  of several methods should be employed in order to
  achieve good results
• Ontologies are living artifacts which are subject
  to change. New information which was previously
  unknown may be discovered or different features
  of the domain may become known or important
• Ontology development is an ongoing process and
  the refinement task will permit TEAM ontologies
  to evolve

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Knowledge Acquisition

• Knowledge acquisition denotes the satisfaction of
  organizational knowledge needs from internal or
  external sources
• Knowledge acquisition is treated as
• an investment in the present, since new, directly
  usable knowledge will be captured
• an investment in the future, since potential
  useful knowledge already available in existing
  systems will be made accessible

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Knowledge Acquisition in TEAM

• Knowledge acquisition of new knowledge has been
  done in two modes
• off-line acquisition of learning rules that help
  in detecting problems encountered by developers
• Eureka study
• on-line acquisition of knowledge through
  interpretation of an aggregated sequence of
  interaction data based on
• developers interaction with IDE (capturing of
  context)
• the application of learned rules (processing of
  context)
• This is not directly visible to software
  developers but has an extraordinary effect on the
  effectiveness and efficiency

DEMO! Context Preferences.avi
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Knowledge Acquisition in TEAM

• Knowledge acquisition has been realized by
  enriching already existing artefacts (e.g. source
  code, issue tracking systems, etc.)
• TEAM system does not replicate existing
  information, but provides explicit model
• It has been done by creating
• Integrated index
• Initial knowledge base
• Extracting metadata
• from structured content (e.g. code structure) and
  from natural language text (e.g. comment in code
  or knowledge documents)
• Linking metadata
• generated metadata for various kinds of sources
  are related semantically (e.g. function names
  that are likely to appear in issue/bug reports
  are linked to the code that is involved in
  producing the bug)

DEMO! Repository crawling.avi
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Knowledge Development

• Knowledge development consists of all the
  management activities intended to produce new
  internal or external knowledge on both the
  individual and the collective level

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Knowledge Development in TEAM

• The TEAM system provides a powerful user
  interface for developing knowledge
• Several modes of putting knowledge into knowledge
  base are supported
• Manual creation of knowledge items based on
  entities from the TEAM ontologies
• Annotation creation
• An important aspect of the TEAM system is
• the ability to annotate semantically source
  code
• Semi-automatic annotation creation
• The TEAM system uses information extraction
• techniques to propose annotation
• Wiki-based knowledge creation
• Wiki provides lightweight and flexible mechanisms
  as well as semantics

DEMO! Knowlege Development.avi
DEMO! Manual Anotation.avi Automatic
annotations.avi
DEMO! Wiki.avi
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Knowledge Distribution

• Knowledge sharing/distribution deals with the
  efficient allocation of knowledge - i.e. how
  isolated knowledge can be made fruitful for the
  overall organization
• In making knowledge available and usable across
  the whole organization, the critical questions
  are
• Who should know what, to what level of detail,
  and how can the organization support these
  processes of knowledge distribution?
• Not everyone needs to know everything!
• Technical knowledge distribution infrastructure
  should support efficient knowledge exchange and
  connect formerly separated experts through an
  electronic network
• P2P infrastructures make it possible for
  different participants (organizations,
  developers, or departments) to maintain their own
  knowledge structure while exchanging information

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Knowledge Distribution in TEAM

• The TEAM system fosters knowledge sharing
• Knowledge is managed in the local machine and
  shared only with those peers that should get this
  knowledge
• This is indeed analogous to the everyday
  practice, where developers share their
  experiences to others in mails or in informal
  discussions
• A P2P architecture also encourages
• the informal sharing aspects

DEMO! Network connect-policy-publish-search.avi Ne
twork setup-policy-publishing.avi Secure publish
of data and search.avi
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Knowledge Preservation

• After knowledge has been acquired or created, it
  must be carefully preserved and managed
• Knowledge preservation is a process of
  maintaining knowledge important to an
  organizations mission that stores knowledge over
  time and provides the possibility of recall for
  the future

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Knowledge Preservation in TEAM

• The TEAM system distinguishes between
• local (private) knowledge, which is not available
  to others and
• public (distributed) knowledge, which is
  available to others via the TEAM P2P network
• Knowledge is represented formally and explicitly
  based on the TEAM ontologies
• TEAM system addresses issues of managing (i.e.
  adding, deleting, modifying, exporting/importing)
  of knowledge
• knowledge items
• annotations
• wikis

DEMO! Preservation.avi
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Knowledge Use

• Knowledge use is the purpose of KM
• It is the productive deployment of organizational
  knowledge in the working process
• The successful identification and distribution of
  critical knowledge does not ensure its daily use
• Without consistent use, there is a high
  probability that new knowledge systems will decay
  in quality, and the investment will be wasted
• The potential user of knowledge has to see a real
  advantage in order to change his or her behaviour
  and adopt the knowledge

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Knowledge Use in TEAM

• The TEAM system supports knowledge use by
  providing services for
• Visualisation
• Searching
• Recommendation
• Browsing

• Visualisation
• The TEAM system combines transparently and
  intuitively the metadata with the TEAM ontologies
• It enables the representation of different
  aspects of the underlying information and allows
  for easy and flexible presentations of the same
  information in two ways
• tree-based representation
• graph-based representation

DEMO! Knowledge Visualisation.avi
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Knowledge Use in TEAM

• The TEAM system supports many advanced methods
  for knowledge search by
• taking into account three different types of
  search, namely keyword, structured and semantic
  search
• integrating results from different repositories
• (i.e. local and P2P storage)
• ranking based on context-related information

DEMO! Search.avi Search in entire network
for public data.avi

• Recommendation
• Knowledge pull Developers may ask explicitly
  for support
• Knowledge push - Since developers are often too
  busy to look for information or do not even know
  that relevant information exists, proactive
  services are provided

DEMO! Recommendation.avi

• Experience use
• Experience on component reuse and error

DEMO! Reuse of experience.mov
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Knowledge Use in TEAM

• Views
• In the TEAM system developers are not only
  contributors of knowledge but also consumers
• It is therefore crucial to provide them with
  means for interacting with this knowledge
• The TEAM system allows navigation through
• search results
• recommendation results
• existing annotations
• WIKIs

DEMO! Views.avi
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Knowledge Measurement (in TEAM)

• The value and potential of the TEAM system as KM
  system (e.g. improving quality of the software,
  reducing time-to-market, increasing productivity,
  etc.) resides in the long-term human action and
  usage
• TEAM will pursue the proof of concept through
  an initial measurement of the systems
  knowledge capabilities and impact on work
  practices during in the summative evaluation
• Knowledge measurement is beyond the projects but
  NOT TEAMs scope

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TEAM as a KM system

• The goal of the TEAM is to collect knowledge the
  developers gain during software development in
  order to avoid mistakes and leverage successes in
  future projects
• Although benefits can be derived from individual
  tools addressing separate software development
  activities, the real power of the TEAM system
  lies in supporting the whole knowledge management
  process
• TEAM can be considered as integrated collections
  of services that facilitate software development
  activities by applying knowledge management
  paradigm in capturing, storing, disseminating,
  and reusing knowledge created during software
  process as well as in integrating existing
  sources

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TEAM as a KM system

• The expected advantages of TEAM system are
• With TEAM system integrated into an IDE, it will
  be easier for developers to create new knowledge.
• The TEAM system will be actively integrated into
  the work process which enables capturing
  information/knowledge during the software
  development process without developers extra
  effort
• The users of TEAM system will not be passive
  receivers of knowledge, but rather active
  constructors of knowledge. Knowledge will be
  constructed in the context of the work
• The TEAM system will support many advanced
  methods for knowledge search by
• taking into account three different types of
  search
• integrating results from different repositories
  (i.e. local and P2P storage)
• ranking based on context

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TEAM as a KM system

• The expected advantages of TEAM system are
• The TEAM system will allow developers not only to
  share their knowledge with other peers but also
  to suggest developers what to share
• Since knowledge management system must provide
  the information that developers need when they
  need it, the TEAM system will play an active role
  in knowledge dissemination
• By monitoring the actions of developers as they
  work, and informing them about potentially
  relevant knowledge for the task at hand, the
  right knowledge will be shared in the right
  moment
• The TEAM system could be also used to better
  support management activities, such as software
  process definition, people allocation and
  estimation, etc.
• This is out of the scope of the TEAM project

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TEAM as a KM system
Phases of the knowledge management cycle
TEAM components
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TEAM Components
KD provides knowledge articulation facilities,
semi-automatic metadata creation and UI for
accessing the system functionality
CS observes and interprets the developers
interaction with the developing environment
SR provides search functionality and
recommendations to solve problems the developer
encounters
MR stores schema information and metadata
and handles the connection and information
exchange with other TEAM systems in the TEAM
network