Enabling Scalable Proactive Workspaces With Environment-Wide Context

Developers use a variety of independent tools to build modern software systems. However, coordinating these tools is a manual process that is laborious and extraneous to the developer's main task. Due to the diversity of projects and tasks that developers work on, one unified tool will never be able to solve this unnecessary work for all developers. Prior work has demonstrated that tools can be integrated through a shared context, which reduces coordination, navigation, and configuration burdens for developers and ultimately leads to higher productivity. These coordinated tools are better able to adapt their behaviour to the developer's current needs. Unfortunately, while these coordinated tools enable the developer to focus on the key aspects of their task, every tool must be directly integrated with every tool. This tight pairwise integration of tools is not scalable as new tools continue to be created to help developers manage ever-increasing software complexity. Reflecting on the scalability challenges of previous integration approaches, this paper introduces a vision for Proactive Workspaces that provide a mechanism for tools to publish and subscribe to context in a scalable way. Through a small feasibility study with 17 developers, we found that this lightweight mechanism enables tools to adapt to the developer's needs as they work, decreasing the overhead associated with coordinating multiple independent tools while increasing developer productivity by enabling them to focus on the important parts of their tasks.