Virtual Radical Collocation for Distributed Software Development: Discussion

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Virtual Radical Collocation for Distributed
Software DevelopmentDiscussion

• Walt Scacchi
• Institute for Software Research
• University of California, Irvine
• Irvine, CA 92697-3455 USA
• http//www.ics.uci.edu/wscacchi/Presentations/VRC
  -DSD.ppt

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VRC Proposal, Olson, et al. 2008

• Significant concepts and ideas
• Concerns or opportunities to address
• Other observations

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VRC Proposal Significant concepts and ideas

• Virtual radical collocation
• When and where VRC based work may be more
  effective than traditional collocated work
• Being there (virtually) without really being
  there (physically)
• Focus on logically centralizing physically
  decentralized software development actors, work
  practices, tools, artifacts
• Embodied VRC via Video walls, online social
  proxies, and 3D virtual workplaces
• J. Noll and W. Scacchi, Supporting Software
  Development in Virtual Enterprises, Journal of
  Digital Information, 1(4), February 1999.

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VRC Proposal Significant concepts and ideas
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Concerns or opportunities to address

• Strengths and weaknesses of large tiled displays
• Visualization content, tiles, and display
  resolution (mis)match
• User engagement sitting versus dynamic roaming
• Window-pane border management vs. content layout
  (e.g., software text, box and arrow diagrams,
  networks, and graphs common in software
  development)
• Online social proxies
• Mixed reality avatars (bots?) that stand-in while
  people are away
• Seeing others vs. engaging others (e.g., eye
  gaze knowing others see you)
• Persistent, reusable gestures
• 3D virtual environments (with real-time
  interacting avatars and spatial audio)
• Networked multi-player games (Half-Life
  CounterStrike) do it already, and do it much
  better than Second Life or others like Miramar
  (Intel) or Qwaq

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Other observations

• 30 years of prior empirical studies of software
  engineering work and productivity
• Relevant domain expertise, teamwork practices,
  and individual differences of developers trump
  all other cost or productivity factors, up to
  10X
• Consider targeting high-value distributed
  software development people
• Software system architects
• Project managers
• Critical event response teams
• Developers of concurrent multi-core applications

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Other observations

• Consider what kinds of distributed software
  development visualizations and tasks to support
• Large system architectural configurations
• Project management via socio-technical
  interaction networks
• Cyber attacks (e.g., network security breach
  localization, isolation, and repair/reconfiguratio
  n)?
• Designing, run-time monitoring, and debugging of
  multi-core software
• Anything else that requires or benefits from a
  massively parallel, snap-to-grid views or
  visualizations of software

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Source C. Amrit and van Hillegersberg, J.,
Detecting Coordination Problems in Collaborative
Software Development Environments, Information
Systems Management, 25(1), 57,70, December 2008.
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