1.
A Self-Organising Awareness System for Distributed Software Engineering - Nutter, David
Software engineers and other collaborative disciplines rely on informal "out-of-band" communication for ef-
fective coordination of their activities, especially in agile methods. This type of communication is lost when devel-
opment is distributed, with consequent deleterious effects on engineer effectiveness. In order to effectively support
distributed software engineering, a replacement for this informal communication must be found.
Much previous research focussed on either synchronous awareness such as radar views and shared editors,
where participants were distributed in space not time, or asynchronous awareness such as change notification, which
did not explicitly support concurrent activities. A unified approach is necessary to support software engineering.
Furthermore, requiring co-location...
2.
Self archiving of research output - Nutter, David
Presentation discussing the benefits of a self-archiving repository for the University of Lincoln, given as part of our internal seminar series and then presented to the Library systems development group.
3.
The GENESIS platform, its distribution, and web services - Rank, Stephen; Nutter, David; Lavery, Janet; Boldyreff, Cornelia
The GENESIS project is developing an Open Source platform that supports co-operation and communication among software engineers belonging to distributed development teams involved in modeling, controlling, and measuring software development and maintenance processes. The GENESIS platform is made up of three main elements: a distributed workflow management system, a resource management system, and an artefact management system (OSCAR, developed at Durham). The platform is designed to be non-invasive and have a low barrier to entry (in terms of the effort required to begin using the system). This is accomplished, as far as possible, by adapting the platform to the workflow...
4.
Simulated self-organization of a peer to peer awareness network - Nutter, David
A simulation process and tool used to test and evaluate the algorithms necessary to optimally arrange a peer-to-peer distributed awareness system for Software Engineering.
5.
Self-archiving of research output for the RAE - Nutter, David
Presentation given to the University RAE Committee to explain the support that ePrints can provide to the RAE data collection process
7.
Historical awareness support and its evaluation in collaborative software engineering - Nutter, David; Boldyreff, Cornelia
The types of awareness relevant to collaborative soft-
ware engineering are identified and an additional type,
"historical awareness" is proposed. This new type of
awareness is the knowledge of how software artefacts re-
sulting from collaboration have evolved in the course of
their development.
The types of awareness that different software engineer-
ing environment architectures can support are discussed. A
way to add awareness support to our existing OSCAR sys-
tem, a component of the GENESIS software engineering
platform, is proposed. Finally ways of instrumenting and
evaluating the awareness support offered by the modified
system are outlined.
8.
Supporting collaborative grid application development within the escience community - Boldyreff, Cornelia; Nutter, David
The systemic representation and organisation of software artefacts, e.g. specifications, designs, interfaces, and implementations, resulting from the development of large distributed systems from software components have been addressed by our research within the Practitioner and AMES projects [1,2,3,4]. Without appropriate representations and organisations, large collections of existing software are not amenable to the activities of software reuse and software maintenance, as these activities are likely to be severely hindered by the difficulties of understanding the software applications and their associated components. In both of these projects, static analysis of source code and other development artefacts, where available, and subsequent application...
9.
WETICE 2004 Evaluating Collaborative Enterprises (ECE) Workshop - Final report - Nutter, David; Boldyreff, Cornelia
A summary of the fifth Evaluating Collaborative Enterprises (ECE)
workshop which ran on June 14th at University of Modena, Italy. The
overall theme of the workshop this year was evaluation within the
software lifecyle rather than as a separate activity. Each of the
five papers touched on this subject and the subsequent winner of
Best Paper covered it thoroughly.
Concerns about the level of interactivity within the workshop and
WETICE itself prompted a format change to ``paired-paper'' sessions
with plenty of discussion time.
Several outstanding issus were identified during the discussion,
including development of ``evaluation components'' alongside
software components, the...
10.
Evaluation of an awareness distribution mechanism: a simulation approach - Nutter, David; Boldyreff, Cornelia
In distributed software engineering, the role of informal communication is frequently overlooked. Participants simply employ their own ad-hoc methods of informal communication. Consequently such communication is haphazard, irregular, and rarely recorded as part of the project documentation. Thus, a need for tool support to facilitate more systematic informal communication via awareness has been identified. The tool proposed is based on the provision of awareness support that recognises the complete context of the evolution of software artefacts rather than single events.
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networking has been successfully
employed to develop various distributed software engineering support tools. However, there are scalability problems inherent...
11.
Communication and conflict issues in collaborative software research projects - Boldyreff, Cornelia; Nutter, David; Rank, Stephen
The Open Source Component Artefact Repository (OS-
CAR) was developed under the auspices of the GENESIS
project to store data produced during the software development process. Significant problems were encountered during the course of the project in both the development itself and management of the project. The reasons for and potential solutions to these problems are examined with the intention of developing a set of guidelines to enable participants in other collaborative projects to avoid these pitfalls.
We wish to make it clear that we attach no opprobrium
to any of the participants in the GENESIS project as many of the issues we...
12.
Support for Collaborative Component-Based Software Engineering - Rank, Stephen; Boldyreff, Cornelia; Nutter, David; Kyaw, Phyo; Lavery, Janet
Collaborative system composition during design has been poorly supported by traditional CASE tools (which have usually concentrated on supporting individual projects) and almost exclusively focused on static composition. Little support for maintaining large distributed collections of heterogeneous software components across a number of projects has been developed. The CoDEEDS project addresses the collaborative determination, elaboration, and evolution of design spaces that describe both static and dynamic compositions of software components from sources such as component libraries, software service directories, and reuse repositories. The GENESIS project has focussed, in the development of OSCAR, on the creation and maintenance of large software...
13.
Environments to support collaborative software engineering - Boldyreff, Cornelia; Nutter, David; Rank, Stephen; Smith, Mike; Wilcox, Pauline; Dewar, Rick; Weiss, Dawid; Ritrovato, Pierluigi
With increasing globalisation of software production, widespread use of
software components, and the need to maintain software systems over long
periods of time, there has been a recognition that better support
for collaborative working is needed by software engineers.
In this paper, two approaches to developing
improved system support for collaborative software engineering are
described: GENESIS and OPHELIA.
As both projects are moving towards industrial trials and eventual publicreleases of their systems, this exercise of comparing and
contrasting our approaches has provided the basis for future
collaboration between our projects particularly in carrying out
comparative studies of our approaches in practical use.
14.
An artefact repository to support distributed software engineering - Nutter, David; Boldyreff, Cornelia; Rank, Stephen
The Open Source Component Artefact Repository (OSCAR)
system is a component of the GENESIS platform designed to
non-invasively inter-operate with work-flow management systems, development tools and existing repository systems to support a distributed software engineering team working collaboratively. Every artefact possesses a collection of associated meta-data, both standard and domain-specific presented as an XML document. Within OSCAR, artefacts are made aware of changes to related artefacts using notifications, allowing them to modify their own meta-data actively in contrast to other software repositories where users must perform all and any modifications, however trivial.
This recording of events, including user interactions provides a complete picture...
15.
Adaptive reuse of Libre software systems for supporting on-line collaboration - Adams, Paul; Boldyreff, Cornelia; Nutter, David; Rank, Stephen
In this paper, the adaptive reuse of Plone; an open source content management system is described. In one instance, Plone has been used as the backbone of a collaboration and communication support infrastructure within a large research project. In the other, Plone has been used as the main web-presence of a specialist group of the British Computer Society. This paper analyses the benefits and problems of reusing Plone to support collaboration. Based on this reuse experience, a more systematic approach to supporting Plone reuse is proposed. This approach takes into account the special case of reuse support relevant to open...
16.
An evaluation framework to drive future evolution of a research prototype - Nutter, David; Rank, Stephen; Boldyreff, Cornelia
The Open Source Component Artefact Repository (OSCAR) requires
evaluation to confirm its suitability as a development environment
for distributed software engineers. The evaluation will take note of
several factors including usability of OSCAR as a stand-alone system,
scalability and maintainability of the system and novel features not
provided by existing artefact management systems. Additionally, the
evaluation design attempts to address some of the omissions (due to
time constraints) from the industrial partner evaluations.
This evaluation is intended to be a prelude to the evaluation of the
awareness support being added to OSCAR; thus establishing a baseline
to which the...
17.
Architectural requirements for an open source component and artefact repository system within GENESIS - Boldyreff, Cornelia; Nutter, David; Rank, Stephen
When software is being created by distributed teams of software
engineers, it is necessary to manage the
work-flow, processes, and artefacts which are involved in the
engineering process. The GENESIS project aims to address some of the
technical issues involved by providing a software system to support
distributed development. One of the parts of the system will be known
as OSCAR, a repository for managing distributed artefacts. Artefacts
can be process models, software components, design documents, or any
other kind of entity associated with the software engineering
process. OSCAR will be designed as a light-weight distributed system,
managing the storage and access to a distributed repository of
artefacts.
This paper presents and...
18.
Supporting collaborative Grid application development within the e-Science community - Nutter, David; Boldyreff, Cornelia; Rank, Stephen; Kyaw, Phyo
Collaboration by use of common artifacts is at the core of e-science. A recent enabling technology is the Grid, which ties together heterogeneous computation and data resources through the use of middleware, linking the techniques and resources to infer higher-level knowledge. This article presents results from research and development of Grid technology for semantic interoperability between scientific artifacts on the web. The research employs the 'industry-as-laboratory' approach to software development. This means development of theory and models through successive implementations, their deployment in pilot studies and subsequent evaluation studies. The research is exemplified through the case of the OSCAR project,...
19.
An open source collaboration infrastructure for Calibre - Nutter, David; Rank, Stephen; Boldyreff, Cornelia
The study of Free and Open Source (Libre) software and the benefits provided by its processes and products to collaborative software development has been somewhat ad hoc. Each project wishing to use tools and techniques drawn from Libre software conducts its own research, thus duplicating effort, consequently there is a lack of established community practice on which new projects can draw. Long-standing intuitive theories of Libre development lack empirical validation. The long-term goal is to provide a resource to guide the evolution of Libre-software projects, from inception to maturity. The CALIBRE project is a co-ordination action aiming to address these...
1.
