Extended Reality in Global Software Delivery - Towards a Common Fabric of Understanding and Insights

Large IT organizations depend on a global software delivery model which involves large teams with various roles and stakeholders. As software delivery is inherently collaborative, it requires the different roles to share artifacts, knowledge and insights with each other throughout the delivery life-cycle. Typically, each role has different insight and understanding needs, based on her/his context and activities. An architect may need to understand the system from a modularity perspective, a developer from code quality purposes, whereas a tester would need to understand it from a user-triggered flow perspective. However, the way we represent, understand, and collaborate on software artefacts, is still limited by the confines of traditional 2D computer screens. In this paper, we present our early work of an Extended Reality (XR) based approach that leverages affordances of natural human perception to represent and visualize software applications in three dimensions. This immersive approach is aimed at becoming a common fabric across global delivery roles, making activities like application comprehension, architecture analysis, knowledge communication, and analysis of a software's dynamic aspects, more contextual, richer, and intuitive. We posit that the use of XR, specifically augmented/mixed reality-based multidimensional views of different software artefacts, can be adapted to be an intuitive bridge across different roles, and foster a novel way of collaboration (both locally and globally). Here, we present our immersive approach and its prototype implementation, along with examples of its usage by different project roles. We also discuss some early feedback and the way forward.