Getting feedback on our work to date...

On Wednesday, July 17, our team had the chance to meet with our advisory group again (last meeting was in September last year).

James Wickham (from Trinity College Dublin), Seamas Kelly and Pamela Abbott (from University College Dublin) visited us for a day to discuss our research to date.

The whole team was present (Prof.Liam Bannon, Gabriela Avram, Anders Sigfridsson, Daniel Sullivan, Anne Sheehan and Michael Cooke). Muireann O'Brien, our STARs guest for the summer, joined us as well.
The morning was dedicated to presentations. Liam opened the meeting, presenting the current status of our research.

• Anne came next, speaking about her work together with Anders on positioning our own work in the landscape of Global Software Development;
• Anders spoke about our approach in studying the PyPy Open Source community using situated learning as lens; in connection with this, he commented on his intentions to focus his PhD thesis on learning in the workplace;
• Daniel made an introduction in the topic of his master thesis (Defect Tracking Systems) and presented his latest observations from recent fieldwork.
• Gabriela spoke about her field observations on collaborative work practices in GSD and the major topics she sees evolving: tools adoption, e-meetings, social networking in the corporate environment.

The ideas in each presentation were commented in detail both by our guests and by the other participants.

The afternoon was dedicated to discussing the current stage of our research and the future plans.

We all found the discussions extremely useful for our work. It was a real work meeting, in which we put into light both the strengths and the weaknesses we could see in our work and got useful feedback from the members of the advisory group (and Liam!). They confirmed the value of our approach and encouraged us to continue on the same lines.