The work-reflection-learning cycle - Department of Computer and ...

three examples in the form of excerpts from real IM logs, to provide the reader with a flavor of the actual
IM usage in the teams. While our research approach does not enable us to quantify the representativeness
of the examples, we address more informally in the below sections what can be considered typical and
untypical.
4.1 Team-internal use of instant messaging
A type of IM usage very frequently seen in the teams, is brief coordination and information sharing
within the team, synchronous and asynchronous. IM is a channel constantly open to the other team
members and used as a convenient way to get an indication about others‟ presence (in the buddy list) or
sharing information even when the other team member is present and sitting nearby. Frequently, small
amounts of workspace contents are shared by pasting it directly into a chat window, which may be very
effective to provide context for a question or with concrete information needed for a specific task. In the
world of software engineering, exact syntax is often essential to make things work, which makes „cut and
paste‟ very useful.
In general, from our observations, the use of IM for these brief exchanges appears to be well integrated
into the students‟ way of communicating with their peers and presents few problems to the projects. In
line with the work on interruption management (Garrett and Danziger 2008) we note that the students
cope with always being „on‟ and available.
Team-internal IM use is however not limited to brief exchanges. Example 1 shows an excerpt from a
conversation between Dave and Chuck, two out of the three members in a 2007 team, and the ones most
involved in the team‟s development work. Dave and Chuck were generally working very well together,
for several reasons preferring a distributed work arrangement and using IM to discuss ongoing work.
They had access to a shared server and worked on different, but integrated parts of the system. With this
partially shared workspace, Dave and Chuck could immediately see some of the results of the other‟s
work, but not all. Results could however be communicated through the IM chat window.
In the excerpt shown in Example 1, the project is approaching deadline, and Dave and Chuck are working
from their respective homes late at night. The conversation takes place between 03:57:58 and 04:10:53
a.m. The overarching task is debugging: identifying and correcting errors in the code.
The excerpt contains several references to the development work going on in parallel, both the current
events in the shared workspace (e.g. “pop, a notepad”, Dave referring to a text-editing window appearing
on his screen) and ongoing tasks for which the two students have distributed responsibility (e.g. Dave:
“but what about conditionals? do they run correctly”. Chuck: “don‟t think move runs correctly”. Dave:
“ok”). A shared understanding of the current state of work is thus constantly maintained and re-created.
New tasks are identified, negotiated and assigned. (Dave: “can you debug it?”. Chuck:”I‟ll just have a
look at the installer first”. Dave:”ok”).
Humor is extensively used in the conversation, see for instance the emoticons like “:OOO” and the
outburst “give me that much work because of nothing!”. The generally positive tone and close
relationship between the two students permits remarks like the last one to be given without resulting
tension. Also, the tone of the conversation should be seen in light of the ongoing final project spurt and
fact that the work and the conversation takes place in the middle of the night.
Incidentally, the excerpt in Example 1 does not include the sharing of textual elements like pieces of
source code or error messages, but the whole chat from which the excerpt is taken contains much of this
type of material.
The entire log shows that the chat window was kept open for about 29 hours. This includes breaks when
the team members went to get some sleep, food, coffee, or take a shower. The log contains comments
addressing these activities.
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