Dejana Bajic, Masters student, is researching how companies developing software applications are finding ways to use social media techniques to gather feedback from users collectively. She analyzed UserVoice data from over 40 companies and interviewed people at 20 software companies to identify several factors influence the ways in which companies make use of social media to build user communities and gather feedback from their users. Dejana presented her work as a poster at the Consortium for Software Engineering Research (CSER) Fall Workshop, 2010.

Fan Dong, Masters student, is investigating decision-making in collaborative online environments. He has selected a decision-making technique from the 1960s, the Delphi approach which specifically relies on anonymity among participants and the use of a coordinator to facilitate the decision-making process. By investigating its use in a social media platform, he has had to come up with ways to adhere to the Delphi principles while taking advantage of some of the aspects of social media platforms that contradict these principles. This past summer, he participated in an internship at SAP Business Objects in Vancouver where he implemented his approach in their social media platform, StreamWork. He is currently evaluating its effectiveness in a real group decision-making activity we are conducting in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Fan presented his work as a poster and demo at CASCON 2010.

Abayomi King, Masters student, is investigating how automatically providing real-time, automatic, passive awareness to software developers of about each others’ activities in common their development IDE can help with collaboration in distributed software development teams. She has developed an Eclipse plugin that automatically gleans from the Eclipse IDE, what activities a user is currently performing and creates a status message for the user. This status message is displayed as their current Instant Messaging (IM) tool (either Google Talk or Sametime). Abayomi presented her work as a poster at the Consortium for Software Engineering Research (CSER) Fall Workshop, 2010, as a demo and poster at CASCON 2010, and as a scholarship winner at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, 2010.