Extending Collaboration
While JRP provided techniques that support collaboration within a close-knit development team, such teams rarely work in isolation: A team of developers may need to coordinate with other programming teams, as well as other groups that may consist of project managers, requirements analysts, quality assurance engineers, project managers, architects, designers, writers, and other specialists. In 2005, as a follow-up to our JRP work, we built a research prototype system—ActivitySpaces—that addresses the need for collaboration not just within teams, but also across teams (Figure 3).
The concepts of spaces, people, artifacts, and tasks are central to ActivitySpaces. Figure 3 shows the interface of a user (Figure 3(a)) who is currently present in the "Orion" team space (an individual can be in only one space at a time). The "Artifacts View" (Figure 3(b)) presents a shared, hierarchical view of the artifact repository for the space. Members of the team space can create, delete, and modify artifacts; they view and edit artifacts in the viewer/editor pane (Figure 3(c)). The "Tasks View" (Figure 3(d)) presents a shared view of the team's hierarchical "to do" list, representing work the team has planned, started, or completed. Members can create, view, and edit tasks; for instance, assign them to someone, modify their status, or associate artifacts with them. The "Current Task View" (Figure 3(e)) gives users a way to switch among assigned tasks, making the related artifacts, subtasks, and discussions for that task easily available, as well as providing awareness to other team members of which task is being worked on. Discussions taking place in the team space are contextual; that is, they are anchored on the team's artifacts or tasks. Users can select an artifact or task, right-click, and begin a discussion about the item. All teammates see a discussion entry appear below the item (Figure 3(f)) and immediately know what the conversation is about; if interested, they can click on the item to join. The conversations are shared by the entire team and persist until explicitly deleted.
The ActivitySpaces system provides users with real-time awareness of what is happening in their current space, namely information about their teammates, artifacts, and tasks. Like JRP, the buddy bar (Figure 3(g)) depicts members of the current space and indicates their status (color if present in this space, grayscale if offline, and grayscale with a green person decorator if they are present in another space). Tooltips reveal information about the teammates' locations and current tasks (Figure 3(h)).
At a glance, the Artifacts View reveals valuable information about the team's shared artifacts. If someone else has created or modified an artifact, its text appears in bold type until the user views it. The ActivitySpaces system has a simple check-out/check-in model for modifying items; and if an artifact has been checked out, it appears with a small person decorator. Mousing over the item brings up a tooltip indicating who has checked out that item for modification. Similarly, a glance at the Tasks View reveals rich information about the team's tasks. All team members can see that a task is new or modified (bold type), that it's in progress (asterisk decorator), that it's been completed (checkbox decorator), or that it has been checked out for modification (person decorator). Mousing over the item produces a tooltip with further data—who created the task, who is assigned to it, who has checked it out. In both the Artifacts and Tasks views, discussion items are marked with a person decorator if someone is presently participating in the discussion. Mousing over the item brings up a tooltip listing the participants.
One of the problems with conventional team space systems is that it's not easy for a user to easily see the information in a space that is of particular importance or interest. The ActivitySpaces system makes inferences about what tasks and artifacts are significant to particular users. For instance, a task is important to a user if that person is assigned to work on it, and an artifact is important to the user if it has been associated with one of their assigned tasks. Artifacts and tasks that are of particular importance to a user are distinguished by blue type, rather than grey, to appear more salient. If an important artifact has been created (or an existing important artifact has been modified), it appears in bold blue type, becoming even more conspicuous. Thus, while every member of a space sees the same structure in the Artifacts and Task views, each sees a customized view in terms of color and typeface.
The ActivitySpaces system supports a user's membership in multiple teams by providing a "space bar" view (Figure 3(i)): The icon at the far left indicates one's current space, while the icons to the right represent the other spaces to which one belongs. The space bar provides real-time, personalized cross-space awareness. At a glance, the view gives the user real-time, personalized awareness of what is happening "right now" in one's other spaces, without even leaving the current space. Space icons appear in color if at least one member is present (otherwise, they appear in grayscale). Hovering over a space icon produces a tooltip with real-time information about what's going on in the space, such as how many members are present, what activities they're engaged in, what discussions are occurring, how many artifacts have been created or modified since the last visit (and how many of them are important to the user), how many tasks have been created or modified (and how many of them are relevant). Users may decide to visit some of the more active and relevant spaces. The space bar supports easy cross-space navigation; clicking on a space's icon takes the user to that space, and the buddy bar and other views are updated to reflect the new context. The ActivitySpaces system supports cross-space collaboration via channels, a publication-and-subscription mechanism that enables spaces to selectively share particular content with other spaces and allows selective contributions, changes, and discussions from other spaces, without fully opening up the entire team space to outsiders.
