Dashboards: Enhancing Developer Situational Awareness

Issue trackers monitor the progress of software development "issues", such as bug fixes and discussions about features. Typically, developers subscribe to issues they are interested in through the tracker, and are informed of changes and new developments via automated email. In practice, however, this approach does not scale well, as developers may receive large volumes of messages that they must sort through using their mail client; over time, it becomes increasingly challenging for them to maintain awareness of the issues that are relevant to their activities and tasks. To address this problem, we present a tool called DASH that is implemented in the form of personalized views of issues; developers indicate issues of interest and DASH presents customized views of their progress and informs them of changes as they occur.