Visualized Awareness Support For Collaborative Software Development Mobile Devices

To foster innovation and competition,more and more software teams are becoming distributed,and this distribution incurs many challenges for collaboration.There is an urgent need for continuous coordination and continuous awareness support.Traditional desktop-based approaches are insufficient for the requirement of continuous awareness.In practical process of software development,an awareness tool on mobile devices is also desirable for the development members to obtain the awareness information continuously.This thesis addresses how to effectively present collaborative development activities on mobile screens.The information visualization methods for software collaborative are investigated considering the characteristics of the mobile visualization.We introduce simple mobile visualization methods,and analyze the problems that should be addressed for mobile information visualization.Due to the hierarchical nature of the collaborative information in software development,this thesis presents a hierarchical information display method.Our approach supports multiple views suitable for software developers as well as team leaders.In the work reported in this thesis,we have improved the original visualization by using an adapted Treemap layout and a visual design in Mondrian style.Our visualization makes full use of precious screen estate and blends in an aesthetic view to maximally engage the user.A baseline usability experiment and an eye-tracking experiment have been conducted and reported on the effectiveness and usability of the visualization method.