A preliminary user evaluation of an infrastructure to support Activity-Based Computing in global software development (ABC4GSD)

Global Software Engineering (GSE) teams face challenges due to the need to replace traditional physical presence interactions and co-ordination with computer-mediated means. A vast majority of the available tool support for distributed collaboration is deep-seated in a desktop metaphor introduced in the '70s, and huge efforts are being devoted to overcome its known limitations. Over the last few years we have looked into the feasibility of providing an approach based on Activity-Based Computing (ABC) to address these issues in a novel way. We have developed a middleware and support tool, ABC4GSD, to enable collaborative distributed features in an application, while maintaining common interactions with the workstation that users are accustomed to. In this paper we present the results of a user evaluation we conducted on ABC4GSD using exemplar GSE scenarios. Participants' responses show positive and encouraging reception of the activity-based approach to supporting GSE.