IBM Watson Research Center

Project: Waypoints, Tags, and Tours: Applying Social Bookmarking to Software Development Primary Researcher: Li-Te Cheng Contact: li-te_cheng@us.ibm.com When managing software artifacts, it can be difficult to keep track of the ways that they are related to one another, or to remember important points within the documents. In collaboration with the University of Victoria, Canada, this project investigates how to extend the Eclipse development environment to help manage and navigate software artifacts. The design is inspired by combining "waypoints" from geographical navigation with "social tagging" from social bookmarking software to support coordination and communication amongst developers. The result of this research is an open source tool, TagSEA, which is available on Sourceforge.net. We also extend TagSEA with "tours," which allow developers to use their "waypointed" materials to create live technical presentations that combine traditional slideware with seamless transitions to user-specified regions of Eclipse along with visual effects. Related papers and presentations: Storey, M-A., Cheng, L., Bull, I., and Rigby, P. Waypointing and Social Taggijng to Support Program Navigation. Work in Progress - CHI 2006. Storey, M-A., Cheng, L., Bull, I., and Rigby, P. Shared Waypoints and Social Tagging to Support Collaboration in Software Development. Proceedings of CSCW 2006. Cheng, L., Storey, M-A., Desmond, M., and Bull, I. Waypoints, Tags, and Tours : Going Beyond Eclipse Bookmarks via Social Navigation. EclipseCon 2007 Long Talk. to appear. Cheng, L., Desmond, M., and Storey, M-A. Presentations by Programmers for Programmers. ICSE 2007 formal demo. to appear.