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Visualized Awareness Support for Collaborative Software Development on Mobile Devices

Meng-Yao Chen

School of Computer Software, Tianjin University, 92 Weijin Road, Nankai District Tianjin, 300072, China

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Cong Chen

Department of Computer Science, The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX 75080, USA

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Shu-Qing Liu

School of Computer Software, Tianjin University, 92 Weijin Road, Nankai District Tianjin, 300072, China

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, and

Kang Zhang

Department of Computer Science, The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX 75080, USA

Corresponding author.

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https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218194015400094Cited by:2 (Source: Crossref)

Abstract

To foster innovation and competition, an increasing number of software teams are becoming distributed. Such a distribution makes continuous collaboration and continuous awareness support a necessity and also a great challenge. Traditional desktop-based approaches are insufficient for the requirements of continuous awareness. In software development practice, an awareness tool on mobile devices is also desirable for team members to obtain the awareness information continuously. This paper addresses how to effectively present collaborative development activities using aesthetic visualization on mobile screens. Our approach supports multiple views suitable for software developers as well as team leaders. A baseline usability experiment and an eye-tracking experiment have evaluated the effectiveness and usability of the visualization method.

Keywords:

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