Dipl. Inform. Julia Schenk (research associate)

Institute of Computer Science
Software Engineering Working Group

Freie Universität Berlin
Takustr. 9, Room 008
14195 Berlin

E-Mail: julia.schenk@fu-berlin.de

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Research

My research is concerned with the process of Distributed Pair Programming (DPP) compared to Pair Programming (PP). In particular I am interested in the different process phenomena of DPP compared to PP and their consequences concerning the fitness for use of Distributed Pair Programming.

In the PP (face-to-face) setting the parties involved perceive social and implicit situative aspects like the emotional state or the focus of attention of their programming mate as well as his explicit behaviour in general and in the shared workspace. These so-called awareness information are perceived intuitively for the most part, constitute the basis for one's own actions, and are fundamental for an efficient collaboration. Furthermore the participants are unrestricted in their verbal and nonverbal communication.

Due to the spacial distribution in DPP the parties are coupled in the workspace via a groupware for real-time editing, but each participant has his own monitor and input devices (mouse and keyboard). As a result on the one hand the participants do not automatically have the same viewport, nor are they necessarily aware of their programming mate's location and actions in the workspace. The natural channels of perception and communication are not available. During their collaboration the participants are restricted to the communication channels and awareness information provided by the collaboration tool. On the other hand due to their autarkic workspace the participants are less coupled and therefore more flexible during their collaboration. Whenever necessary they can explore separately in the workspace and find together.

This leads to the following questions:

• To which extend the lack of (nonverbal) communication channels and awareness information has an impact on the DPP process?
• How one could overcome these difficulties either through appropriate behavioral patterns of the programming mates or through provided information by the collaboration tool?
• When it is possible to extract advantages from the increased flexibility of DPP?

Testbed for my DPP research is Saros (http://www.saros-project.org), an Open Source Eclipse plugin for distributed collaborative software development, which is developed by the Software Engineering Working Group.

Publications

• Julia Schenk, Lutz Prechelt, Stephan Salinger - Distributed-Pair Programming Can Work Well and Is Not Just Distributed Pair-Programming Companion Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering, Hyderabad, India, June 2014. (ICSE homepage)

• Stephan Salinger, Christopher Oezbek, Karl Beecher, Julia Schenk - Saros: An Eclipse Plug-in for Distributed Party Programming - Proceedings of the 2010 ICSE Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering, May, 2010

• Julia Schenk - Evaluating awareness information in distributed collaborative editing by software-engineers - User Evaluation for Software Engineering Researchers (USER), 2012

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Teaching

• January 2013: "Berliner Zertifikat für Hochschullehre" at the "Berliner Zentrum für Hochschullehre (BZHL)"

Courses 2014

• "Softwaretechnik" (Head tutor)
• "Empirische Bewertung in der Informatik" (Head tutor)
• "Softwareprozesse" (Head tutor)
• "Anwendungssysteme: Auswirkungen der Informatik" (Head tutor)

Courses 2013

• "User-Centered Design: Benutzerzentrierte Softwareentwicklung" (Lecture in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Claudia Müller-Birn)
• "Softwareprojekt: Kundenprojekt User-Centered Design" (Project with Prof. Dr. Claudia Müller-Birn)
• "Softwaretechnik" (Head tutor)

Courses 2012

• "Usability Engineering: Benutzerzentrierte Softwaregestaltung" (Implemented new lecture)
• "Softwaretechnik" (Head tutor)
• "Empirische Bewertung in der Informatik" (Head tutor)
• "Softwareprozesse" (Head tutor)
• "Anwendungssysteme: Auswirkungen der Informatik" (Head tutor)

Courses 2011

• "Softwaretechnik" (Head tutor)
• "Empirische Bewertung in der Informatik" (Head tutor)
• "Softwareprozesse" (Head tutor)
• "Anwendungssysteme: Auswirkungen der Informatik" (Head tutor)

Courses 2010

• "Softwaretechnik" (Head tutor)
• "Anwendungssysteme: Auswirkungen der Informatik" (Head tutor)
• "Softwareprozesse" (Head tutor)

Courses 2009

• "Anwendungssysteme: Auswirkungen der Informatik" (Head tutor)
• "Softwareprozesse" (Head tutor)

for more information see Courses of the Software Engineering Working Group

Supervision of Theses

Finished	Type	Title	pdf
2013-XX	Diploma	Verbesserung der „First Contact Experience“ für angehende Saros-Entwickler
2013-04	Bachelor	Evaluierung einer multimodal bedienbaren und personalisierten Kalenderanwendung auf Basis des mobilen Dialogsystems des DFKI
2012-11	Master	Verbesserung der Usability von Saros unter Verwendung eines User-Centered Design Ansatzes
2012-08	Bachelor	Überarbeitung der Saros Website nach dem User-Centered Design
2012-05	Master	Benutzerzentrierte Entwicklung eines Nutzungskonzepts für das Saros-Whiteboard unter Berücksichtigung der Unterstützung von Grafiktabletts
2012-04	Diploma	Prüfung und Verbesserung der Usability von Saros im produktiven Einsatz
2011-11	Bachelor	Verbesserung der User Experience in Saros
2011-09	Bachelor	Evaluation von Präsenzverfahren in Saros
2011-05	Master	Verbesserung der Out-Of-Box-Experience in Saros mittels Heuristischer Evaluation und Usability-Tests
2011-02	Bachelor	Ideen und Alternativen zur Gestaltung der Saros-Benutzeroberfläche
2010-07	Bachelor	Analyse und Erweiterung der VoIP-Funktionalität in Saros
2010-03	Diploma	Die Einführung von Saros in Open-Source-Software-Projekten

for more information see Thesis topics of the Software Engineering Working Group