Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft

I have blogged previously about interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research. Now I want to turn to disciplinary chasms in software development. Social aspects such as how people communicate, collaborate, and coordinate interest me because as Andy Begel in the HIP group in MSR found, software development teams when coordinating and ...

I would like to invite CodePlex developers to participate in research. If you have been reading my blog posts here on Port25, then you will know that I have been investigating how to integrate usability into open source software development. Now I am seeking research volunteers.   I am looking for developers who are working on projects ...

I am back in Redmond. For those of you who don’t know, I spent last summer here in the open source software lab conducting research on integrating usability into open source. My last blog talked about how I have made some changes to my research program. One change is to situate the research argument within the broader scope of how open source has ...

My last blog was about me traveling to Limerick and Toronto. I have now defended my dissertation proposal and passed. (Yay!) Here is a funny story. A week before the proposal defense I created my presentation and rehearsed it every day until the third day before when I began to get a sore throat. I don’t think it was from rehearsing the ...

I’ve been on the road.. In September, I went to Limerick, Ireland for the 10th European Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (ECSCW) conference. Computer-supported cooperative work is a sub-sub-discipline of computerscience and a sub-discipline of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). CSCW researchers look at groupware, how people collaborate, ...

Developing software has been an engineering discipline with formal methods. The evolution of software methods has ranged from the now outdated waterfall method to formal specification languages with precise semantics. Despite having methodologies, software engineering continues to be difficult. Yet despite having what seems a lack of software ...

In my last blog I talked about interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity and a little bit about my research this summer. In part 1 and 2 of this blog I am going to talk more about the research I have been doing here at Microsoft. Over the last few months I have been looking at a phenomenon called usability expertise. Anybody who has had ...

Bryan has previously blogged about the project partnership between the Penn State University (PSU) College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) and the Open Source Software Lab (OSSL). I am at the OSSL here at Microsoft this summer and next as a research intern. The project, which started in May 2007 and will last two years, is my ...