In global software projects, informal communication across sites is severely hampered, making it difficult to disseminate implicit knowledge. Participants have a partial view of the overall organization, do not have access to the complete rationale behind decisions, and when changes arise, participants from other sites are surprised. Consequently, issues that could be clarified almost immediately require days until the relevant stakeholders are identified, the issues are understood, and a resolution is agreed upon. We focus on the specific problem of externalizing issues with their context, stakeholders, and organizational roles in distributed settings. The challenge is to capture sufficient knowledge as a side effect of development, while structuring it for long-term use. We describe Sysiphus, a distributed environment providing a uniform framework for system models, collaboration artifacts, and organizational models. Sysiphus encourages participants to make communication and issues explicit in the context of system models and become aware of relevant stakeholders

Software engineering courses often use industrial modeling tools for their infrastructure, as it exposes students to the state-of-the practice and increases their awareness about the complexity of their craft. However, this approach has the risk of expending a disproportionate amount of effort on tools as opposed to teaching concepts. Moreover, industrial tools often do not include didactic concepts needed for education. In this paper, we discuss our experience with an integrated, rationale-based modeling tool in a variety of software engineering courses. By providing an integrated modeling environment, students use a single tool for requirements, system design, test planning, and collaboration. By attaching rationale to the models, students are encouraged to reflect on their work while instructors can monitor them and provide more insightful feedback

We have taught several distributed software engineering project courses with students and real clients. During these projects, students in Pittsburgh and Munich, Germany collaborated in the development of a single system. Our experiences showed that software development is communication intensive and requires the collaboration of many stakeholders. Communication is challenging in distributed contexts: participants do not all know each other and work at different times and locations; the number of participants and their organization change during the project; and participants belong to different communities. Hence, to deal with the global marketplace, it is critical to provide students with distributed collaboration skills. To improve the teaching of collaboration in software engineering, we propose iBistro, an augmented, distributed, and ubiquitous communication space. iBistro aims to overcome problems resulting from miscommunications and information loss in informal or casual meetings. iBistro enables distributed groups to collaborate and cooperate in software projects and therefore provides an environment for learning in diverse aspects such as project management, programming skills, and social skills. With the addition of techniques from artificial intelligence, such as student modeling, and intelligent support mechanisms, such as computer supported group formation, distributed tutoring becomes feasible.

Mobile augmented reality applications promise substantial savings in time and costs for product designers, in particular, for large products requiring scale models and expensive clay mockups (e.g., cars). Such applications are novel and introduce interesting challenges when attempting to describe them to potential users and stakeholders. For example, it is difficult, a priori, to assess the nonfunctional requirements of such applications and anticipate the usability issues that the product designers are likely to raise. In this paper, we describe our efforts to develop a proof-of-concept AR system for car designers. Over the course of a year, we developed two prototypes, one within a university context, the other at a car manufacturer. The lessons learned from both efforts illustrate the technical and human challenges encountered when closely collaborating with the end user in the design of a novel application.

Augmented Reality (AR), mobile computing, and ubiquitous computing have each individually provided technology enablers for new types of applications. Researchers have demonstrated over the years spectacular toy systems that fire researchers' imaginations. However, cross-fertilization between these areas has only just begun. Combining these technology enablers into robust information systems that can be used in the field present many software engineering challenges that have not been taken into account by the toy systems mentioned above. In this paper, we report our efforts at TU Munich to analyze information generation, retrieval, transmission, and visualization in the context of maintenance procedures in nuclear powerplants. The use of AR to present such information online has significant implications on the overall system architecture. This paper focuses on pointing out open questions, discussing options for addressing them, and evaluating them in prototypical implementations.

As a result of globalization, mergers, acquisitions, and scarce skills, software development is becoming increasingly distributed. Distribution, however, introduces major communication barriers, including time zone differences, cultural differences, and most project participants have never met face to face. In this paper, we focus on "knowledge scouts," developers who travel briefly to other sites and report to their home base what they have discovered and learned. With a case study we show how knowledge scouts can overcome many communication issues. We propose that the research focus should be on the simpler problem of supporting a small mobile group of developers as a means of addressing the inherent communication obstacles in distributed software projects.

Communication and collaboration is difficult in geographically distributed settings. As a result of globalization, mergers and acquisitions, and scarce skills, software development projects are increasingly more distributed. Hence, teaching software engineering students how to cope with distribution becomes a critical issue. This paper describes our experience with teaching three distributed software engineering project courses. Students from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA and from Technische Universita/spl uml/t Mu/spl uml/nchen in Munich, Germany, collaborated to specify, design and realize software for a real client located at a third site. In doing so, students were exposed first hand to distribution issues, encountering challenges introduced by different cultures, languages, standards and time zones, and facing them with tools such as groupware, videoconferencing, distributed repositories and travel. We conclude this paper with the lessons we learned during these three experiences and the improvements we plan for our next distributed project course.

Presents empirical evidence that metrics on communication artifacts generated by groupware tools can be used to gain significant insight into the development process that produced them. We describe a test-bed for developing and testing communication metrics, a senior-level software engineering project course at Carnegie Mellon University, in which we conducted several studies and experiments from 1991-1996 with more than 400 participants. Such a test-bed is an ideal environment for empirical software engineering, providing sufficient realism while allowing for controlled observation of important project parameters. We describe three proof-of-concept experiments to illustrate the value of communication metrics in software development projects. Finally, we propose a statistical framework based on structural equations for validating these communication metrics.

ABSTRACTtWe present empirical evidence that metrics on communication artifacts generated by groupware tools can be used to gain significant insight into the development process that produced them.We describe a testbed for developing and testing communication metrics, a senior level software engineering project course at Carnegie Mellon University, in which we conducted several studies and experiments from 1991 to 1996 with more than 300 participants.Such a testbed is an ideal environment for empirical software engineering, providing sufficient realism while allowing for controlled observation of important project parameters.We illustrate the value of communication metrics with three proof-of-concept experiments and propose a statistical framework based on structural equations for validating communication metrics.

BOS is a prototype-based, object-oriented toolkit aimed at better supporting evolutionary software development. BOS attempts to support a spectrum of activities in one environment---ranging from rapid prototyping to code hardening. Features enabling rapid prototyping include a prototype-based object model, an interpreted language, run-time argument constraints, position and keyword arguments, and a user interface toolkit. BOS also provides features for code hardening such as multi-methods, multiple inheritance, external code wrapping mechanisms, and interfaces to other packages such as database management systems. BOS thus enables the end-to-end programming of software in an integrated and unified environment. BOS has been used to develop several full-size applications which have been evaluated and delivered externally.

Vuman is a wearable portable computer used for navigation through electronic blueprints. Thirty working units of Vuman were designed and manufactured from system concept using a concurrent engineering design environment. The authors describe the steps in prototyping Vuman, using the suite of synthesis and analysis tools in the electronic and mechanical domains which comprise the concurrent engineering design environment. Some unforeseen problems and their proposed solutions are discussed.>