Abstract

Recent advances in small inexpensive sensors, cheaper storage, and low-power processing cause an increasing popularity of trackers that quantify a user’s activities throughout his everyday life. The Fitbit and the Nike+ Fuelband are two examples of commercial approaches that motivate a user to be more active by tracking his activity and visualizing the analyzed data. In the area of software engineering there are similar tools to support a developer in a single domain of his work, such as planning tools or bug repositories. Only little research has been performed on how to integrate the available data and how to focus on providing a retrospection of a developer’s work day.In order to contribute to overcome this shortcoming we introduce a tool, Happy Coder that provides developers with a retrospective analysis of their work day, by tracking predefined metrics and visualizing them on a web client. This includes a front-end with consolidated data analysis, visualizations and representations of the collected data. Two studies revealed that developers assess their productivity based on a personal evaluation of their work day. This assessment is dominated by personal preferences of different metrics like work items, meetings, web searches or activities on the computer. In this talk, we present related work, interesting findings of our studies and Happy Coder.

The growing globalization attracts many enterprises to distribute their software development. Aside multiple risks and problems, there are a variety of advantages; e.g. saving time and money, finding the right people and working at the customers place. In this paper, the motivation for the development of software in a scattered environment is summarized. Furthermore, challenges such as cultural and communication problems, time-zone differences, management issues, language barriers, etc. are addressed together with selected solutions to avoid the collapse or delay of projects.

Author’s comment

I’m happy to tell you, that I just finished my bachelor thesis. It was an extremely intresting experience and I learnt a lot. I want to thank everyone for their help. I now got the chance to further work on this project at the S.E.A.L. group 🙂
You may find more information here.

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You may download the paper here. Thank you!

Abstract

The growing globalization attracts many enterprises to distribute their software development. Aside multiple risks and problems, there are a variety of advantages; e.g. saving time and money, finding the right people and working at the customers place. In this paper, the motivation for the development of software in a scattered environment is summarized. Furthermore, challenges such as cultural and communication problems, time-zone differences, management issues, language barriers, etc. are addressed together with selected solutions to avoid the collapse or delay of projects.
The growing globalization attracts many enterprises to distribute their software development. Aside multiple risks and problems, there are a variety of advantages; e.g. saving time and money, finding the right people and working at the customers place. In this paper, the motivation for the development of software in a scattered environment is summarized. Furthermore, challenges such as cultural and communication problems, time-zone differences, management issues, language barriers, etc. are addressed together with selected solutions to avoid the collapse or delay of projects.

Author’s comment

I’m proud to tell you, that I just finished my really first paper. I wrote it in a course called “Advanced Software Engineering” at the Department of Informatics, University of Zurich. If you have further questions or remarks, feel free to contact me.

Download

You may download the paper here. Thank you!