Software engineering is becoming more and more distributed. Developers and other stakeholders are often located in different locations, departments, and countries and operating within different time zones. Most online software design and modeling tools are not adequate for distributed collaboration since they do not support awareness and lack features for effective communication. The aim of our research is to support distributed software design activities in Virtual Reality (VR). Using design science research methodology, we design and evaluate a tool for collaborative design in VR. We evaluate the collaboration efficiency and recall of design information when using the VR software design environment compared to a non-VR software design environment. Moreover, we collect the perceptions and preferences of users to explore the opportunities and challenges that were incurred by using the VR software design environment. We find that there is no significant difference in the efficiency and recall of design information when using the VR compared to the non-VR environment. Furthermore, we find that developers are more satisfied with collaboration in VR. The results of our research and similar studies show that working in VR is not yet faster or more efficient than working on standard desktops. It is very important to improve the interface in VR (gestures with haptics, keyboard and voice input), as confirmed by the difference in results between the first and second evaluation.

Software is the main driver of added-value in many of the systems that surround us. While its complexity is increasing, so is the diversity of systems driven by software. To meet the challenges emerging from this combination, it is necessary to mobilize increasingly large and heterogeneous multidisciplinary teams, comprising software experts, as well as experts from various domains related to the systems driven by software. Hence, the quality of communication about software between stakeholders of different domains and with different personalities is becoming a key issue for successfully engineering software-intensive systems. The goal of this study, thus, is to investigate the effect of the representation of software design models on the communication of design decisions between stakeholders with diverse personality traits. As a result, this study finds that graphical representations of software design models are better than textual representations in enhancing the communication and increasing the productivity of stakeholders with diverse personalities.

Abstract Context Software engineering is a social and collaborative activity. Communicating and sharing knowledge between software developers requires much effort. Hence, the quality of communication plays an important role in influencing project success. To better understand the effect of communication on project success, more in-depth empirical studies investigating this phenomenon are needed. Objective We investigate the effect of using a graphical versus textual design description on co-located software design communication. Method Therefore, we conducted a family of experiments involving a mix of 240 software engineering students from four universities. We examined how different design representations (i.e., graphical vs. textual) affect the ability to Explain, Understand, Recall, and Actively Communicate knowledge. Results We found that the graphical design description is better than the textual in promoting Active Discussion between developers and improving the Recall of design details. Furthermore, compared to its unaltered version, a well-organized and motivated textual design description–that is used for the same amount of time–enhances the recall of design details and increases the amount of active discussions at the cost of reducing the perceived quality of explaining.

To fulfill the contractual requirement of the Sweden Compact agreement, the following funding note has to be added and placed in the Funding section of the original article: Open access funding provided by University of Gothenburg .

This paper introduces our approach to a real-time synchronous collaborative modeling of software systems using 3D UML in a way similar to shared Google Document online with the aim to reduce the complexity of UML models and to increase work efficiency. In our approach, we decided to visualize the system with 2D UML diagrams on interconnected layers containing components (in class diagrams) or use case scenarios of the system (in sequence or activity diagrams) in 3D space. The goal of our method is to improve user's awareness of other developers in a multi-user workspace, adjust redundant components and visualize the history of user's actions in the UML class diagrams.

In this paper, we propose a new approach to visualization of software repositories that allow users to search and explore software projects in virtual reality. In provided environment, respective information structures are mapped to interactive 3D objects. We assume that such transformation of information space to its visible representation will enable the users to gain problem domain knowledge subliminally during the explorations, and that the acquired knowledge will help them to fulfill future tasks more effectively.