Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Networked development environments: what are
they and what could they mean for collaboration between programmers and domain
scientists?
Abstract
Inspired by the need to supporting interdisciplinary
student teams working on software development projects, we have created a prototype
system for distributed groups to share computational "work in progress".
The result is what one might call a "networked development environment" or
a "computational wiki". We are currently exploring how this environment
can improve collaboration between biologists who need small computational tools
to advance their research and software developers who have the skills to produce
the tools quickly and with high quality. There are challenges: scientists and
developers each have their own technical languages; they need to work with hard-to-capture
dynamic artifacts such as data and programs; they have differing notions of the
value of tool reuse; and collaboration is often triggered by crisis rather than
opportunity. This presentation will demonstrate the networked development environment
concept, connect the concept with emerging ideas of "Web 2.0" and invite
discussion around implications for developer-scientist collaborations.
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