Two Canadian universities who received funding from Armonk, NY.-based IBM Corp. to further work on collaborative technologies for developers will showcase their initial research work this week in Montréal at the conference for Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (ooPSLA).
The University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria each received US$50,000 over two years (an amount also matched by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) toward the development of tools for IBM's Jazz community, which seeks to build a team collaboration platform for integrating tasks across the software development cycle.
The purpose of the Jazz Faculty Grant is to enable research of the technology that could eventually lead to commercial products, and to build a community and knowledge base around the technology, said John Kellerman, project manager for Jazz and Eclipse with IBM Rational software.
The community building aspect is of particular focus, said Kellerman, who hopes that will come about by leveraging the technology through research, academic coursework, and through the open source community.
"By providing money to research… these people will become vocal evangelists which then in turn benefit the community" for successful technologies, he said.
The University of British Columbia is developing technology for the Jazz platform called Emergent Expertise Locator (EEL) that can assign a developer to a team based on working behaviour, such as the types of files that are committed, and the people with which that person typically communicates.
"When we need to collaborate with somebody the tool can actually recommend who they should collaborate with," said Gail Murphy, professor at the University of British Columbia's computer science department.
The driver behind wanting to develop such a tool, said Murphy, was the fact that the Jazz platform has a "static notion of collaboration," meaning the developer would have to indicate up front what team they were or should be working with.
But overall, Murphy's goal is to reduce information overload for developers with tools that take advantage of the context in which someone is working "to get the right information in front of people's eyes at the right time."
The University of Victoria plans to put its grant funds toward continuing to develop tools for the Jazz platform that improve coordination in software development, in particular for globally-distributed teams, said Daniela Damian, associate professor in the University of Victoria's department of computer science.
Such dispersed teams, she said, typically "experience significant challenges in communication, coordination and collaboration."
The research team has built primarily two prototypes. The first, Feature Awareness Team Explorer helps a developer connect with others based on program features that person is working on.
The second, Related Contributors Plug-in, takes a contributor approach by matching a developer with other relevant developers "and says John from Ottawa works on this, and Alan from Zurich works on this."
Besides being important for knowledge dissemination, the technology is also useful for keeping abreast of changes that others may have made to the code. "One of the problems is if you don't find out [of a change] at the right time, you have to rework your code," said Damian.
Besides the Canadian schools, University of California, Irvine, received funding. The selection, said Kellerman, is based on each institution's research, track record and proposals.
The grant was the first of its kind. IBM is considering future funding for Jazz.
According to Kellerman, the Jazz collaboration technology will continue to undergo development via the community. Currently, two kinds of downloads are available to users: beta and incubator.
The beta is a subset of technology that community members feel has the potential to get commercialized. Meanwhile, incubator is its less mature counterpart with no clearly defined path to becoming a product or part of a product. "Some of them evolve to become part of a beta, and other incubators will go away."
