David LeBlanc (2011)

                                                                                                                         Using On-Line Tools to Drive Group Development Projects (2011)

Traditional approaches to software development involved extensive planning and scheduling of nearly all development tasks in advance. As such, the actual development of the functioning system ('coding') happened with a minimum of day-to-day communication and tracking. With the development of modern Agile approaches to software development, much of the planning and scheduling is done 'on the fly', necessitating a well-developed system for communication and for keeping track of who is working on what and how they are progressing. In this talk I will discuss how a simple on-line tool (Google Docs) is used by students to coordinate, schedule and track group development projects that run from 3-8 months.

David LeBlanc is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Prince Edward Island.  He has a background in artificial intelligence, cognitive science and theoretical linguistics, with degrees in computer science and linguistics.  His current research focuses on cross-cultural variation in interface design—work he is eager to expand to the study of variation in player preferences within video games.  This work involves experimental usability testing.