Aduno

Aduno is a open source real time collaborative articulation and task creation tool. It is a research tool that assists teams in gaining a shared understanding and common ground when performing design or articulation based tasks.

Aduno offers a shared workspace where a software development team with a Github-hosted project, can collaboratively manipulate their workflow using visual components. Teams can sign in with their Github account details and access their repositories, and Aduno imports the project’s issues on the workspace in the form of work items. Users can create, edit, link, and move around work items to organize their joint actions, and coordinate about them by communicating through the tool’s chat area. In real time users can also see all changes that other team members are making on the work board and Aduno’s visual layout allows them to maintain workspace awareness. The contents of the work board can then be exported to Github’s issue tracker, integrated directly into the team’s workflow.

Team communication and coordination is an integral part of the software development process and is a challenge whenever collaborating teams are distributed. Although it is typical for project management systems in services such as Github to allow comments on each issue, we have included a chat area in Aduno. The comments on work items in Github are used for asynchronous communication, and this was not sufficient for our tool. A chat system provides users with a secondary communication channel that allows them to engage in a synchronous discussion about work items that would not typically be appropriate for asynchronous work item comments. Since comments in Github must also be attached to only one work item, having this chat area helps teams develop broader goals and facilitates common ground through more in- depth conversation.

If you would like to know more about the project, or want to get in touch, contact me on twitter.

Publications

Braden Simpson, Eirini Kalliamvakou, Nathan Lambert, Daniela Damian. Aduno: Real-Time Collaborative Work Design In A Shared Workspace In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE), San Francisco, USA, 2013 (to appear).