The invention relates to the field of systems for managing and sharing-expertise, particularly collaboration on electronic works such as collaboration among computer programmers.
In the current knowledge-based economy, something approaching one out of every four employees is a knowledge-based worker. Most of these employees are working with structured documents such as electronic files, web pages and the like. Improving the management of such workers for improved productivity is an important goal. It may be important for managers to be able to determine which worker has expertise in a particular area. For example, in the writing of software code or other electronic projects, often a number of individuals work in collaboration. In such situations it may be helpful for a manager to be able to determine which of the programmers is an expert on a particular section of the code. It may also be important for improving productivity to have the employees spend less time searching for the artifacts of interest to a particular project, so it may be helpful to know which workers have accessed particular documents when working on the project.
A number of approaches to expertise reporting are presently used. The problem with existing methods is they do not include who considered what information categorized by task and weighting expertise by frequency and recency of interaction with the information. U.S. Pat. No. 6,377,983 discloses a method and system for converting expertise based on document usage. A user can access a browse path of another user, such as an expert, in a particular content area. U.S. Pat. No. 6,928,425 discloses a system for propagating enrichment between documents. It uses interaction history for document enrichment rather than expertise. United States Published Patent Application Publication no. 2006/0200794 discloses a system and method for managing user interaction data in a networked environment which involves gathering and displaying user interaction data. None of these provide a task-based analysis.
The foregoing examples of the related art and limitations related thereto are intended to be illustrative and not exclusive. Other limitations of the related art will become apparent to those of skill in the art upon a reading of the specification and a study of the drawings.
The following embodiments and aspects thereof are described and illustrated in conjunction with systems, tools and methods which are meant to be exemplary and illustrative, not limiting in scope. In various embodiments, one or more of the above-described problems have been reduced or eliminated, while other embodiments are directed to other improvements.
The invention provides a method and system for reporting expertise. Each task which is worked on by a user is given a name. Each time a user works on files on the system, or interacts on networked resources such as web pages, the system records the task context, consisting of the interaction stream or history which is generated as the user works on the selected task. Tasks and their associated contexts are recorded and saved in the system database. A Reporting User requests an expertise report by entering a query to specify a subset of tasks which is to be covered by the report. The query is executed, and the requested subset of tasks and associated task contexts are extracted from the task repository. The document structure for each element found in the context is extracted from the task contexts. The individual users/people who worked on the task contexts are also extracted. The system then formats a display of documents and people to calculate and display the Degree of Interest. For a given person, the system finds the contexts on which the person worked. For each context, the system processes the context through Degree of Interest (DOI) modeling, producing the DOI of a person in each element (document) mentioned in the contexts. The system stores the aggregate DOI of a person in documents mentioned in the contexts in a selected display format, such as a grid. Once the display format has been completed for all persons it is displayed to the Reporting User.
In addition to the exemplary aspects and embodiments described above, further aspects and embodiments will become apparent by reference to the drawings and by study of the following detailed descriptions.
Exemplary embodiments are illustrated in referenced figures of the drawings. It is intended that the embodiments and figures disclosed herein are to be considered illustrative rather than restrictive.
Throughout the following description specific details are set forth in order to provide a more thorough understanding to persons skilled in the art. However, well known elements may not have been shown or described in detail to avoid unnecessarily obscuring the disclosure. Accordingly, the description and drawings are to be regarded in an illustrative, rather than a restrictive, sense.
For purposes of this application, a “piece of structured information” is a piece of information which has a specified location. Examples are web pages, and files which are identified by location. An “element” is a piece of structured information or a parent of a piece of structured information in the hierarchy of structured information. An element is also referred to as an “artifact”. A “task” is any unit of work as defined by the user. A task can be defined by the user or taken from a task repository, such as bug/ticket/issue trackers like Bugzilla, Trac or JIRA. In the following description and claims, the term “document” includes pieces of structured information, which includes files as well as networked resources such as web pages.
Various software applications exist for tracking and monitoring. One such software application which is particularly useful for the present invention is Eclipse Mylyn (“Mylyn”). Other monitoring software can be used in the present invention provided it establishes tasks that are worked on and lists which structured information was accessed as part of the task. Mylyn is an open-source task-focused user interface on the Eclipse platform that reduces information overload and makes multi-tasking easier. It does this by making tasks a part of Eclipse, and integrating offline editing for repositories such as Bugzilla, Trac and JIRA. Once the tasks are integrated, Mylyn monitors the user's work activity to identify information relevant to the task-at-hand, and uses this task context to focus the Eclipse user interface on the interesting information, hide the uninteresting, and automatically find what is related. This improves productivity by reducing searching, scrolling, and navigation. By making task context explicit, Mylyn also facilitates multitasking, planning, reusing past efforts, and sharing expertise.
Mylyn monitors a programmer's activities and captures the relevance of code elements to their tasks in a degree-of-interest model (DOI). For example, when a programmer selects or edits a program element, Mylyn increases the interest level of that element. Mylyn uses the DOI model to populate views within the Eclipse IDE. Mylyn is described in the paper “Mylyn: a degree-of-interest model for IDEs” by Mik Kersten and Gail C. Murphy published at the March 2005 AOSD conference, and the paper “Using task context to improve programmer productivity” by Mik Kersten and Gail C. Murphy published at the 2006 Foundations of Software Engineering Symposium, which are incorporated herein by reference.
With reference to
All tasks and their associated contexts are recorded and saved in the system Task Repository database 12. A Reporting User 14 (for example, a manager) can request an expertise report from the Task Repository 12. The system generates the expertise report 16 following the steps shown in
For a given person A, the system finds the contexts on which the person worked. For each context B, the system processes the context through Degree of Interest (DOI) modeling, using Mylyn's algorithm for calculating the DOI, producing the DOI of person A in each element (document) mentioned in the contexts. The system stores the aggregate DOI of person A in documents mentioned in the contexts in a grid. Once the grid has been completed for all persons it is displayed to the Reporting User 14 as shown in
The invention permits the tracking of interactions in parts of a document. The interactions can then be aggregated to an entire document. Thus the system can track sub-structures and aggregate to the complete structure. For example, section accesses can be tracked within a Microsoft Word document and the expertise displayed at the section level or the entire document level or both.
The benefit of the invention is that the Reporting User can immediately visually analyze who the experts are in a particular area and which documents they are accessing. It will be apparent to those skilled in the art that other displays will also be useful, such as a bar graph or purely textual display. Also while the display shows persons and documents (elements) it could also display tasks instead of persons in the grid. The system can be used for expertise reporting for any knowledge workers working on structured documents. While Mylyn is the preferred application to generate the DOI, any tracking or monitoring software which tracks tasks, lists the structured information accessed as part of the task, and generates a value for the interaction with the structured information can be used.
While a number of exemplary aspects and embodiments have been discussed above, those of skill in the art will recognize certain modifications, permutations, additions and sub-combinations thereof. It is therefore intended that the invention be interpreted to include all such modifications, permutations, additions and sub-combinations as are within its true scope.
This application claims the benefit of U.S. provisional application No. 60/943,922 filed Jun. 14, 2007 entitled “Method and System for Interaction-based Expertise Reporting”, which is incorporated herein by reference.
Number | Date | Country | |
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60943922 | Jun 2007 | US |