Mashup Environments in Software Engineering

Software developers perform different kinds of analytical activities. For example, they want to find out which code might be affected by a change, which change caused a bug or build failure, or which source code was changing in work items related to performance issues. Similarly, project managers might want to learn from the latest iteration of product development by analyzing produced artifacts, e.g. work items, source code and build results. There are many tasks in software engineering that would benefit from tools that enable the flexible and integrated analysis of information stored in different places such as issue trackers, source code repositories, and requirements documents.

Together with Christoph Treude and Margaret-Anne Storey, I outlined the idea how mashup technology can be leveraged to achieve this. Our 2 page position paper "Mashup Environments in Software Engineering" was accepted at Web2SE, the First Workshop on Web 2.0 for Software Engineering, co-located with ICSE 2010. Here is the abstract of our paper:

Too often, software engineering (SE) tool research is focused on
creating small, stand-alone tools that address rarely understood
developer needs. We believe that research should instead provide
developers with flexible environments and interoperable tools,
and then study how developers appropriate and tailor these tools
in practice. Although there has been some prior work on this, we
feel that flexible tool environments for SE have not yet been fully
explored. In particular, we propose adopting the Web 2.0 idea of
mashups and mashup environments to support SE practitioners in
analytic activities involving multiple information sources.

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