Initial Evaluation of ABC4GSD

As I have shared on these pages that we are trying to build an infrastructure based on the principles of Activity Based Computing (ABC), a paradigm that is being increasingly explored for designing Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) and software application inspired by Activity Theory (AT). This work  has resulted in an infrastructure, called ABC4GSD, for enabling existing and future software engineering tools to benefit from the promises of being activity aware. Whilst our current and planned work on this topic is expected to spawn several interesting research challenges to be addressed for supporting the next generation of tool support, our immediate focus is to evaluate the infrastructure developed so far and enhance it based on the evaluation outcome and our own research agenda. We have performed an initial evaluation whose results have been published in a paper that was presented by Paolo Tell at the 8th International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE 2013) yesterday. The slides of the presentation provide some highlights of our initial effort of evaluating this infrastructure. Further details can be found in our paper that provides a detailed account of the pilot expert evaluation performed for assessing ABC4GSD using some of the typical scenarios of GSD. We are very keen to find industrial and research collaborators to discuss the possibilities of enhancing this infrastructure and conducting systematic evaluation with large distributed teams that may be interested in an experimental use of the infrastructure for enabling their tools activity aware or want to develop and deploy new tools that can leverage the ABC4GSD infrastructure.