What is an Informative Workspace?

An informative workspace is a workspace with feedback mechanisms designed to help those who are working in it.

How is this project going to implement the informative workspace?

Informative Workspaces tend to blend the physical and virtual: "manually updated non-electronic visual displays" co-exist with "electronic devices hooked up to automated processes". The result (as Kent Beck puts it), is "when an interested observer walks into your team space, s/he should be able to get a general idea of how your project is going in 15 seconds, and be able to get a deeper perspective on real or potential problems by looking more closely."

This project is focused on adding an automated, electronic display to the growing arsenal of informative workspace tools. The first version of this project will be built for this 3x3 monitor grid. Software developers who want to track their projects' progress with software such as Hackystat, Hudson CI, structure 101, and intra-dev-team communications through Google discussion pages, IMs, and twitter will be able to use this system to bring all of that data together in one dynamic "billboard" updated in real time. The billboard will summarize the current state of things so that when a member of a development team steps in the room, they will immediately get a big-picture sense of where they are in the project.

A workspace can often consist of multiple teams involved in different "sub-projects". One office can create a single account in this IW billboard and create multiple profiles in that account for each team that uses the same office space. Each profile will have a different unique set of data and the account master profile will gather data from all the profiles for parallel comparison and integrated analysis.

Teams and managers can pick which data is most important for them at any given stage in the development. A balance needs to be struck between giving the user sufficient control, and keeping the system automated and "hands-off" so as not to distract from the important work being done in the workspace.

The project currently consists of a ProjectOverviewer, which acts as the heart of a given (sub)project. It takes up one screen and shows various HackyStat statistics through a HeatMap about the project its files.

Initial investigation into a CountdownClock, a ChatRoom integration, the CyVis complexity analysis, and HackystatTelemetry has also been done. See the RoadMap and respective wikipages for more details.