Bug triaging is an important activity in any software development project. It involves developers working through the set of unassigned bugs, determining for each of the bugs whether it represents a new issue that should receive attention, and, if so, assigning it to a developer and a milestone. Current tools provide only minimal support for bug triaging and especially break down when developers must triage a large number of bug reports, since those reports can only be viewed one-by-one. This paper presents PorchLight, a novel tool that uses tags, attached to individual bug reports by queries expressed in a specialized bug query language, to organize bug reports into sets so developers can explore, work with, and ultimately assign bugs effectively in meaningful groups. We describe the challenges in supporting bug triaging, the design decisions upon which PorchLight rests, and the technical aspects of the implementation. We conclude with an early evaluation that involved six professional developers who assessed PorchLight and its potential for their day-to-day triaging duties.

In this paper, I describe a novel approach for developing and evaluating an infrastructure for supporting informal knowledge capture, representation, and reuse during software design meetings. It is the goal of this work to address the challenges that exist in reusing knowledge while at the whiteboard. The research centers on the design and evaluation of DesignMinders, a tool that augments electronic whiteboards to support the capture and exploration of knowledge using electronic note cards, which can be used over time to preserve knowledge generated during past sessions. The tool will be analyzed in an evaluation that will compare designs produced by two teams, one using DesignMinders and one not.

Integration engines are a crucial piece of the health care information technology puzzle. Health care organizations like hospitals and clinics are faced with vast amounts of data and a slew of interchange standards and protocols when addressing the issue of exchanging data between information systems. This paper describes our experience in developing Mirth, a popular open source health care messaging integration engine. Based on a unique client-server and enterprise service bus hybrid architecture, Mirth supports the development of interfaces for moving data between two or more systems. We describe the Mirth architecture in detail and discuss our experiences through several case studies that demonstrate its use. We also provide our insights gained in designing the Mirth architecture through several lessons learned.

Workspace awareness techniques have been proposed to enhance the effectiveness of software configuration management systems in coordinating parallel work. These techniques share information regarding ongoing changes, so potential conflicts can be detected during development, instead of when changes are completed and committed to a repository. To date, however, workspace awareness techniques only address direct conflicts, which arise due to concurrent changes to the same artifact, but are unable to support indirect conflicts, which arise due to ongoing changes in one artifact affecting concurrent changes in an-other artifact. In this paper, we present a new, cross-workspace awareness technique that supports one particular kind of indirect conflict, namely those indirect conflicts caused by changes to class signatures. We introduce our approach, discuss its implementation in our workspace awareness tool Palantír, illustrate its potential through two pilot studies, and lay out how to generalize the technique to a broader set of indirect conflicts