Promoting developer-specific awareness

Abstract

Maintaining a developer's awareness of changes in the software on which she depends is challenging. Awareness is often impeded at two ends of the spectrum: a lack of information, when the changes only become apparent when a build breaks or bugs appear; or an excess of information, where the changes are announced but the majority of the changes are not relevant to the developer in her particular project and context. In the middle ground lies the possibility of support for developer-specific awareness (DSA), wherein information about the changes is filtered on the basis of the developer's own code and interests. This paper discusses how the DSA problem is manifested in software development and briefly examines the design space involved in providing DSA notifications. A particular point in the space is proposed for a target implementation, called the YooHoo awareness system, that will help developers in loose organizations to keep apprised of any code changes that are specifically relevant to the source code for which they are responsible.