The ASPIC Research Program
In collaborative work it is essential to have knowledge about the context in which you are working to properly cooperate with others. With information about the context we mean information about the other members in the project team, their activities, information about the state of the project and so on. The term 'awareness' is often used to denote this. It is essential because this knowledge is necessary for coordinating actions, managing coupling, discussing tasks, anticipating others' actions, and finding help. Because of the lack of a shared physical working environment, having sufficient contextual information is more difficult in a distributed setting than in a co-located setting. We will illustrate this with an example:
Say you are a project member in a co-located project and the other members of the project team are located in the same room. When you face an issue you require help with, you turn around and look through the room. Which colleagues are present? Which colleagues seem available? Who has the skills to help you out? In a glimpse you assess the available people and decide how to ask for help (or decide not to ask). In such settings you also have unplanned informal conversations (for example at the coffee machine), you learn about the competences of your colleagues, what they are working on and how busy they are. Because of this knowledge about the status and competences of your colleagues it is much easier to assess whether it is acceptable and advantageous to approach one of them and ask for help.
Now imagine the same situation, but your colleagues are working hundreds of miles away. When you face the same issue it is much harder to ask a colleague for assistance. This is because it is far harder to asses everyone's status with respect to having the time to help you. Next to this it might also be difficult to find out who has the competence you need to help you solve your issue. Furthermore, you are not sure which means of communication you should employ to contact with your colleague once and you do not really know which means of communication are at that time feasible at all. Is your colleague currently using one of these means of communication? Does this block this means of communication? Does the target prefer to use certain means of communication? In dislocated settings you simply do not have the same overview as you have in co-located setting by simply being there.
The goal of the ASPIC research program is to develop solutions to the problems caused by the difficulties with acquiring and maintaining awareness in a distributed setting. In this research the focus lies on making the sharing of information a more passive activity which in turn will likely lower the effort to share awareness information, cause this information to be more recent and improve the quality of the information as well. To do this we will first identify the information from the context of a project that is important to coordinate and integrate the activities of the members of the development team. Following this we will select those information items for which there is a lot to gain with respect to sharing awareness information in a more passive way and develop supporting technology to valorize the concept. Summarizing, we can define the following three research questions:
- RQ1: What types of contextual information are important in collaborative software engineering?
- RQ2: For which of those types is there a lot to gain with respect to sharing awareness information in a more passive way in a distributed environment?
- RQ3: How can sharing awareness information in a more passive way be valorized by technological support?
