Continuous Coordination: Bridging Formal and Informal Coordination with Palantír

February 16, 2007
Anita Sarma | UC Irvine

Modern software engineering tools exhibit a fundamental paradox: they are meant to support the collaborative activity of software development, but cause individuals and groups to work independently from one another. The underlying issue is that existing tools discretize time and tasks in concrete but isolated process steps. This approach is fundamentally flawed in assuming that human activity can be codified and that periodic resynchronization of tasks is an easy step. In this talk, I present a new approach, continuous coordination, which blends a strong process-based approach with the sharing of “awareness information” to inform developers of relevant ongoing parallel activities. I present continuous coordination and describe Palantír, my research prototype and how it strives to realize this goal. Furthermore, I present a taxonomy of collaboration tools in software development and chart a road map building on the approach of continuous coordination for tools of the future.

Speaker Details

Anita Sarma is completing a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences and is a member of the Institute for Software Research, at the University of California, Irvine. She holds a joint B.S. and M.S. degree in Management from Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences, Pilani, India and a M.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests lie at the intersection of CSCW/HCI and Software Engineering and focuses on the study, design, and implementation of coordination tools that facilitate distributed software development. As part of her dissertation, she has developed Palantír, a novel workspace awareness tool that combines the concepts of awareness with Configuration Management systems to enable developers to detect potential conflicts early and take proactive steps to avoid them.