Research

Here you find an overview of research on Saros and distributed party programming.
 

 

Research topics and questions

The AG SE has been doing research on pair programming for a number of years. Saros is a platform for extending this work to distributed pair programming (and general collaborative programming). We also investigate a number of research questions that concern the Saros tool itself (and similar tools).
 
  • How to introduce distributed pair programming? Effects? 
    We are working with companies that perform distributed software engineering and are interested in collaborative programming (via Saros) as a means for abating some of the problems that this tends to bring along.
    We are also studying how to introduce Saros and DPP into Open-Source projects and what effects the use of Saros has on such projects.
 
  • How should Saros work? 
    Saros has a number of interesting usability aspects in a number of areas, for instance:
    • learning its concepts and base operation
    • useful functionality beyond mere text editing
    • practical forms of session management
    • awareness of what the other participants are doing We are studying these aspects via multiple channels such as gathering written user feedback, collecting and analyzing fine-grained usage data, and explicit usability studies.
 
  • Saros usage statistics and diagrams 
    Saros includes a statistical framework which is responsible for gathering information about the actual usage. This information ranges from the plain duration of a session to much more detailed facets such as role swaps performed or text edits contributed. For each session - assuming one allows the submission of this anonymous information - a session statistic is sent to our server.
 

 

Publications on Saros

Reviewed research articles

Lutz Prechelt, and Karl Beecher. “Four generic issues for tools-as-plugins illustrated by the distributed editor Saros.” In Proceeding of the 1st workshop on Developing tools as plug-ins, 9. ACM Press, 2011.
Lutz Prechelt. “Some non-usage data for a distributed editor.” In Proceeding of the 4th international workshop on Cooperative and human aspects of software engineering, 48. ACM Press, 2011.
Edna Rosen, Stephan Salinger, and Christopher Oezbek. “Project Kick-off with Distributed Pair Programming.” In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Workshop of Psychology of Programming Interest Group, 121-135. Leganès, Spain: Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, 2010.
Stephan Salinger, Christopher Oezbek, Karl Beecher, and Julia Schenk. “Saros: an eclipse plug-in for distributed party programming.” In Proceedings of the 2010 ICSE Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering, 48-55. ACM Press, 2010.
 

Unreviewed research articles

Riad Djemili, Christopher Oezbek, and Stephan Salinger. “Saros: Eine Eclipse-Erweiterung zur verteilten Paarprogrammierung.” In Software Engineering 2007 - Beiträge zu den Workshops, P-106:317-320. GI-Edition - Lecture Notes in Informatics. Bonn: Köllen Verlag, 2007.
 

Finished Theses

 

Theses in Progress