Evaluation of an awareness distribution mechanism: a simulation approach

In distributed software engineering, the role of informal communication is frequently overlooked. Participants simply
employ their own ad-hoc methods of informal communication. Consequently such communication is haphazard, irregular, and rarely recorded as part of the project documentation. Thus, a need for tool support to facilitate more systematic informal communication via awareness has been
identified. The tool proposed is based on the provision of awareness support that recognises the complete context of
the evolution of software artefacts rather than single events. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networking has been successfully
employed to develop various distributed software engineering support tools. However, there are scalability problems inherent in naive P2P networks. To this end a semantic
overlay network organisation algorithm has been developed and tested in simulation prior to deployment as part of a
forthcoming awareness extension to the Eclipse environment. The simulation verified that the self-organisation algorithm
was suitable for arranging a P2P network, but several unexpected behaviours were observed. These included wandering nodes, starved nodes, and local maxima. Each
of these problems required modification of the original algorithm design to solve or ameliorate them.

Citation:
Nutter, D. & Boldyreff, C. (2005) ‘Evaluation of an awareness distribution mechanism: a simulation approach’ in: 14th IEEE International Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises (WETICE 2005), 13-15 June 2005, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. IEEE Computer Society 2005, pp. 235 - 240.