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Brad Murray

Brad Murray, May 1999
Alcatel, Canada
murrayb@vansel.alcatel.com

Augmented Multi-User Textual Discussions

45 minutes

It is observed that in a complex software project spanning several years of development time, the engineers and managers involved cannot retain all of the information necessary to coherently discuss the project in general or in detail. Component designers understand their component in detail but have only a vague knowledge of the general design. They may have no knowledge at all about the detail of most other components. High level designers understand the overall design of the system, but not the details of each subsystem's design. Management must attend to details realting to customer interaction and feature control rather than design or implementation details. In short, data is only canonically stored in the computer support systems and not in heads.

Unfortunately, important meetings bearing on the design of the software typically occur without a terminal present, forcing each participant to rely solely on the contents of his brain or whatever hardcopy was anticpated to be relevant. Copious paper notes are taken so that sense can be made of the proceeding afterwards, when a terminal is available.

The Augmented Discussion Experiment tests two propositions:

  1. Many meetings would be better off if held in a multi-user textual environment like IRC or MOO, providing access to a local terminal for data and connectivity for many users from different physical locations

  2. Discussions held in such a venue would benefit from the presence of monitoring software that could respond to queries about company-specific data within the context of the conversation.

The implementation of the ADE uses ircd 2.10.2 running on a SparcStation 20 running Solaris 2.5 for the discussion environment, and Kevin Lenzo's infobot version 0.43.6 using Perl 5.005_03 under Windows NT 4.0 for the augmentation.

The changes to infobot will be discussed at length, particularly the extensions which provide access to the corporate databases. These extensions access a wide range of databases using ODBC, and use several different parsing patterns to react in appropriate ways to normal conversation. Future direction of the ADE infobot will also be discussed based on the findings of engineers putting it into use in real design and defect meetings. Finally, there are several instances of completely unexpected usage of the ADE which will be thrown out to the audience for discussion.

A somewhat whimsical account of the birth of the ADE can be found at his personal page.
Kevin Lenzo
Last modified: Mon May 10 10:09:33 EDT 1999