Supporting project awareness on the WWW with the iScent framework

Abstract

Supporting project awareness in the context of large-scale software development is difficult. One problem is identifying appropriate abstractions and techniques that support the insertion of project awareness mechanisms into a software development environment with minimal impact. An additional problem is scaling project awareness mechanisms to handle the demands of large software development projects. The Web is increasingly being used to support software engineering and, as such, becomes an additional target for project awareness mechanisms with its own unique challenges. To maintain awareness of information evolving on an Internet scale, and to address the problems and challenges mentioned above, we present a framework to support awareness and intersubjectivity among software team members through the use of automatically collected, hypermedia-enabled event trails. The concepts, techniques, and tools of event notification and open hypermedia are used to support a new project awareness framework. A distinction of this framework is the presence of mechanisms that explicitly support intersubjectivity among team members and the use of event trails as a new abstraction for providing project awareness information.