Research
In the following you will find all information about Saros in the context of research.
If you are interested in using Saros as part of your own research, feel free to contact us.
Research Topics and Questions
The AG SE (working group software engineering @FU Berlin) 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 (as well as similar tools).
How to introduce distributed pair programming? What are the 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.
The statistical framework is disabled in the current release, because the corresponding infrastructure to process the gathered data is not currently set up. Furthermore, we currently don’t have a use for the data. But we are open to re-integrate the service if this kind of data would become useful again. So, if you are interested in this kind of data, feel free to contact us so that we can discuss possible collaborations.
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.
Theses
The working group software engineering also oversees bachelor’s and master’s theses in the field of computer science at the Freie Universität Berlin. Many of these theses deal with the topic of (distributed) pair programming and/or Saros. For more information, see the list of finished theses and theses in progress.