SecondWATCH: A workspace awareness tool based on a 3-D virtual world

Awareness of fellow developers' activities has been widely recognized as essential in facilitating collaboration in a software developing team. However, as reported in several field studies on software development, awareness information on software artifact and coworker is difficult to acquire. To help software developers maintain group awareness and enhance their collaboration, we developed a prototype workspace awareness tool called SecondWATCH based on Second Life, a 3-D online virtual world. Second-WATCH informs developers of real-time and history artifact and co-worker information by monitoring team members' activities on their local workspaces, version control repository, and bug tracking system. It then extracts, analyzes, and visualizes the information in SL as a common view shared by the whole team using a 3-D city metaphor. We have successfully used SecondWATCH to visualize history information of three open-source Java projects, Free-Mind, JEdit, and GUJ, and also using it as our workspace awareness tool when we are developing it.