Narrow Results

A key feature of collaboration in science and software development is to have a log of what and how is being done - for private use and reuse and for sharing selected parts with collaborators, which most often today are distributed geographically on an ever larger scale. Even better if this log is automatic, created on the fly while a scientist or software developer is working in a habitual way, without the need for extra efforts. The CAVES and CODESH projects address this problem in a novel way, building on the concepts of virtual state and virtual transition to provide an automatic persistent logbook for sessions of data analysis or software development in a collaborating group. A repository of sessions can be configured dynamically to record and make available the knowledge accumulated in the course of a scientific or software endeavor. Access can be controlled to define logbooks of private sessions and sessions shared within or between collaborating groups.

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.

GitHub and Stack Overflow are often used together for software development. GH-SO users, who use both GitHub and Stack Overflow, contribute to the development of various software projects in GitHub and share their knowledge and experience on software development in Stack Overflow. To widely understand the interests and working habits of GH-SO users on software development, it is important to investigate how GH-SO users utilize GitHub and Stack Overflow. In this paper, we present an exploratory study on GitHub commit and Stack Overflow post activities of GH-SO users. Specifically, we investigate the working habits of GH-SO users on GitHub commit and Stack Overflow post activities. We randomly selected 19,756 of GH-SO users as our target sample and collected 2,819,483 and 2,147,317 of commit activity data and post activity data of the GH-SO users. We then categorized the collected commit and post activity datasets into specific categories on programming languages and statistically analyzed the categorized commit and post activity datasets. As the results of our analysis, we found the following: (1) The overall commit and post activities of the GH-SO users share some similarity. (2) The commit activities gradually change while the post activities drastically change over time. (3) The commit activities of the GH-SO users are broadly distributed while the post activities are narrowly distributed and the commit activity can be better predictor for post activity. (4) The commit activity of the GH-SO users tends to be performed prior post activity. We believe that our findings can contribute to finding the ways to better support commit and post activities of GitHub and Stack Overflow users.

The development and installation of new process equipment in production plants typically require strong collaborative efforts by a process firm and its equipment suppliers. However, existing knowledge about how such supplier integration and open innovation practices should be organized and managed is scarce. The purpose of this investigation is therefore to explore how process firms can organize and manage supplier integration and open innovation practices when developing and installing new process technology. By means of a literature review and a case study of two process firms, a lifecycle perspective on procurement is adopted. Our results show that the process firms utilize different interconnected cooperative procurement procedures in different stages of the equipment's lifecycle, in order to enhance integration both in buyer-supplier dyads and among the suppliers in the project network. The contributions of the paper are summarized and illustrated in a developed lifecycle-based procurement model that guides practitioners in organizing and managing supplier integration and open innovation practices.

In view of collaborative development environment web services supplier in ability, cost, time, supplier relations and component relevance information under uncertainty problems. The fuzzy multi-objective task assignment model of web services are built in a collaborative development environment. Using α cut sets and extension principle to simplify the fuzzy multi-objective assignment mode, we get the solution of simplified assignment model via the Genetic and simulated-annealing algorithm. Finally, the simulation results verify the feasibility of the proposed method, which can ensure the suppliers’ tasking in successive software project in collaborative development environment.

China has not formed an advanced and mature collaborative development model based on information technology in the key industry fields of complex products. Aiming at the problem, a collaborative development frame-work of complex products based on the commercial PLM system is constructed in the paper. Combining with the research of representative projects, such as Boeing B787, Airbus A380 and ARJ21 of Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, Ltd., the characteristics of complex product development is analyzed, the collaborative development hiberarchy based on systems engineering is explored, and the general function framework which support the whole life cycle and the entire supplier network of complex product development is put forth and realized based on the commercial PLM system. The project practice shows that the framework can effectively perform the integration of cross-regional, multi-heterogeneous systems and the unified management of data.