Eclipse as a platform for research on interruption management in software development

Abstract

Automated tools for mediating incoming interruptions are necessary in order to balance the concentration required for software development with the need to collaborate and absorb information. At present, there is no design knowledge for building such tools for programmers. The abundant literature on the general problem of interruptions and awareness does not address the unique characteristics of software development, and the few studies which do are restricted to simpli ed tasks or environments. We attribute this scarcity to dif culties in conducting empirical studies in real settings, because of the need to implement appropriate research tools. Eclipse is poised as an ideal platform for such research thanks to its popularity, plug-in model, and observation hooks. This paper presents Gate- Keeper, a plug-in based framework for managing interruptions, allowing the rapid implementation of different interruption and awareness models, and their integration within actual collaboration tools. To validate our framework, we implemented a rulebased interruption management system, and integrated it with Jazz, an Eclipse-based collaboration tool.