Welcome to the website of The ASPIC Research Program: Awareness-based Support Project for Interpersonal Collaboration
This research program has existed since 2009 and the research is performed by two PHD candidates: Kevin Dullemond and Ben van Gameren.
It is supervised by Arie van Deursen and
Rini van Solingen in the Software Engineering Research Group at the Delft University of Technology.
The research is performed in close cooperation with IHomer.
In collaborative work it is essential to have knowledge about the context in which you are working to properly cooperate with others. With information about the context we mean information about the other members in the project team, their activities, information about the state of the project and so on. The term 'awareness' is often used to denote this. It is essential because this knowledge is necessary for coordinating actions, managing coupling, discussing tasks, anticipating others' actions, and finding help. Because of the lack of a shared physical working environment, having sufficient contextual information is more difficult in a distributed setting than in a co-located setting. We will illustrate this with an example:
Say you are a project member in a co-located project and the other members of the project team are located in the same room. When you face an issue you require help with, you turn around and look through the room. Which colleagues are present? Which colleagues seem available? Who has the skills to help you out? In a glimpse you assess the available people and decide how to ask for help (or decide not to ask). In such settings you also have unplanned informal conversations (for example at the coffee machine), you learn about the competences of your colleagues, what they are working on and how busy they are. Because of this knowledge about the status and competences of your colleagues it is much easier to assess whether it is acceptable and advantageous to approach one of them and ask for help.
Now imagine the same situation, but your colleagues are working hundreds of miles away. When you face the same issue it is much harder to ask a colleague for assistance. This is because it is far harder to asses everyone's status with respect to having the time to help you. Next to this it might also be difficult to find out who has the competence you need to help you solve your issue. Furthermore, you are not sure which means of communication you should employ to contact with your colleague once and you do not really know which means of communication are at that time feasible at all. Is your colleague currently using one of these means of communication? Does this block this means of communication? Does the target prefer to use certain means of communication? In dislocated settings you simply do not have the same overview as you have in co-located setting by simply being there.
The goal of the ASPIC research program is to develop solutions to the problems caused by the difficulties with acquiring and maintaining awareness in a distributed setting. In this research the focus lies on making the sharing of information a more passive activity which in turn will likely lower the effort to share awareness information, cause this information to be more recent and improve the quality of the information as well. To do this we will first identify the information from the context of a project that is important to coordinate and integrate the activities of the members of the development team. Following this we will select those information items for which there is a lot to gain with respect to sharing awareness information in a more passive way and develop supporting technology to valorize the concept. Summarizing, we can define the following three research questions:
Communico is the first tool we developed to support sharing awareness in a distributed setting. In the case of Communico
this concerns seeing what conversations others in your project team are having and offering the possibility to join these conversations. Check out the
video for an introduction and the paper for a more thorough explanation.
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Past Events | |||
Event | Title | Location | Date |
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Vrienden van IHomer | Introduction and progress report of the ASPIC Project | IHomer Etten-Leur | 15th of December 2009 |
SERG Research Colloquium | ASPIC: Awareness-based Support Project for Interpersonal Collaboration | Technical University Delft | 14th of January 2010 |
ICGSE 2010 Doctoral Symposium | ASPIC: Awareness-based Support Project for Interpersonal Collaboration in Software Engineering | Princeton, NJ, USA | 23th of August 2010 |
ICGSE 2010 Main Conference | Virtual Open Conversation Spaces: Towards Improved Awareness in a GSE setting | Princeton, NJ, USA | 26th of August 2010 |
Communico Case Study | Kick Off | Delft | 20th of October 2010 |
CSCW 2011 Video Track | Communico: Overhearing Conversations in a Virtual Office | Hangzhou, China | 22th of March 2011 |
ICGSE 2011 Main Conference | Evaluating the Effectiveness of Board Game Usage to Teach GSE Dynamics | Helsinki, Finland | 18th of August 2011 |
CollaborateCom 2011 Main Conference | An Exploratory Study on Open Conversation Spaces in Global Software Engineering | Orlando, Florida, USA | 16th of October 2011 |
CollaborateCom 2011 Main Conference | Overhearing Conversations in Global Software Engineering - Requirements and an Implementation | Orlando, Florida, USA | 16th of October 2011 |
CHASE 2012 Workshop | Supporting Distributed Software Engineering in a Fully Distributed Organization | Zürich, Switzerland | 2nd of June, 2012 |
ICGSE 2012 Main Conference | An Industrial Evaluation of Technological Support for Overhearing Conversations in Global Software Engineering | Porto Alegre, Brazil | 28th of August 2012 |
Vrienden van IHomer | Iris | IHomer Breda | 18th of September 2012 |
CollaborateCom 2012 Main Conference | Collaboration should become a first-class citizen in support environments for software engineers | Pittburg, USA | October 14-17, 2012 |
CollaborateCom 2012 Main Conference | Auto-Erecting Virtual Office Walls | Pittburg, USA | October 14-17, 2012 |
MSR 2013 Working Conference | Fixing the ’out of sight out of mind’ problem - One Year of Mood-Based Microblogging in a Distributed Software Team | San Fransisco, USA | May 18-19, 2013 |
ICGSE 2013 Main Conference | What Distributed Software Teams need to know and when: an Empirical Study | Bari, Italy | 27th of August 2013 |
ICGSE 2013 Main Conference | Auto-Erecting Virtual Office Walls A Controlled Experiment | Bari, Italy | 29th of August 2013 |