Software Engineering Architecture Team
The University of Tulsa
reSEAT yourself in our world of research...
SEREBRO - Software Engineering REwards for BRainstorming Online, 2008-Present
Click on this link to log
in to SEREBRO 3.0 with your guest account.
Note: As of January 16th, 2009 SEREBRO 3.0 has been deployed; you may notice some minor changes from the descriptions on this page.
Login with your guest account information and assigned password.
Note: Use Firefox 2.0 or higher. Some buttons may not
display clearly in IE due to inadequate browser standards support.
To get started: Click on a project, such
as Bronze Team, to go to the topic forum. Click on a topic with a large
number of posts. Scroll through the thread or click on the graph view
button at the top to see the entire net. Mousing over any node in the
graph view will display the post. If you scroll down on this page,
you will see other screen shots to help you.
SEREBRO is a web-based application for software development with three objectives for encouraging and rewarding creativity:
(a) build a graphical, asynchronously communicated, idea network to interconnect ideas and support creativity via a social
networking platform, (b) tailor idea network usage to explicit phases of software development to encourage creativity
toward project milestones, and (c) investigate mechanisms that assess the idea proliferation and propagation to reward
creativity.
The main challenge behind recognizing and rewarding creative contribution by team members in a Software Engineering
project is to devise a framework that captures and relates ideas as they are generated while guiding the design process
toward project milestones. The core notion of creative process we
use is an idea. An idea can be a belief statement, a problem solving approach, a solution to a problem or a discussion
related to any idea type. Idea-related activities include Brainstorming, Spinning, Pruning and Finalizing. Examples of
these activities can be seen in the figure below.
The design objectives for our initial creativity support tool, SEREBRO 1.0. included:
- Visualizing the team's creative discourse through a network of ideas associated with designated milestone achievements, such as those found in the Rational Unified Process (RUP).
- Asynchronous communication via a social networking platform with email alerts of postings.
- Team decision capturing regarding idea implementation, emerging concepts, and task generation.
- Reinforcement learning mechanisms to reward creativity based on metrics related to idea proliferation and propagation through the network.
The current version, SEREBRO 2.0 is enhanced with software project management components that tie into the idea network
and reward scheme. These include uploading files for sharing, version control for changes to the product implementations,
a Wiki to document product artifacts, a calendar tool, and a Gantt chart. SEREBRO 2.0 uses a finer granularity of milestones,
removing the need for the RUP.
Brief Tutorial
Note: Scroll down to section entitled 'Video' to view a video demonstration of the website.
Upon logging into SEREBRO you will be at the 'Home' page which lists all of the projects within SEREBRO.
As a guest you can view any project (although you are not a 'member') by clicking on it's name. Click on
a Team Metal, such as Bronze Team, under Projects to see that team's project. By default the first screen shown upon entering
a project is the activity feed. The activity feed is a collection of recent actions within a project, such as ideas, uploads
, tasks, wiki or svn changes. You can browse the feed or alternatively, click 'Forum' in the project toolbar located on the
left side of the page, as shown below in Figure 2. The forum is the collection of ideas, or the SEREBRO idea network. Take note here within each project the
SEREBRO navigation panel on the left will update to include project specific locations such as the
forum, wiki, uploads, etc.
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Within the 'Forum' view, click a 'Topic' header to view its contents. Here you will see the 'Post View' of the
ideas within the topic thread. You can alternatively click the 'Graph View' button, located at the top of the
topic thread, to view a graphical representation of the idea network. This is especially helpful for very active
topic threads which have complex structures. Try 'hovering' your mouse over a graph node within the 'Graph View',
notice upon hovering you can view the post to which the node corresponds.
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Figure 4 below demonstrates the details of an inidivial post within a topic thread in the
forum. Observe the top of Figure 4 below, the idea type is one of brainstorm, agree, disagree,
or finalized. Additional idea types can correspond to meeting notes from face-to-face meetings
that do not involve SEREBRO directly but are encoded in SEREBRO to capture the meeting minutes.
The thread name denotes the start of an idea network under the "New Icon" topic (not displayed).
The arrows on the right hand side indicate a tangible outcome connection when 'moused' over;
in this case two document uploads occurred due to this post. On the left-hand side, the personal
graphic is part of the user's customization. The badges iconify the level of earned creativity
reward points. The reputation shows the scale of creativity that team members associate with a
user's post. The post's date and time are recorded. The post text is the main component of the
post. On the bottom, the credit button lets the user say whether they worked outside their role,
input to the wiki, svn, or upload area, or posted the idea with another team member. The archive
button is used to remove posts from a reward strategy, such as discussions on when to have meetings.
The edit button allows the poster or other team members to alter the post. The person, time,
and date of the edit are displayed in red inside the post. Agree and disagree buttons spawn new
threads. Stop and finalize are buttons only seen by the team leader with team agreement to cease
contributions to a thread or to finalize a thread into a single concept or topic for the next
milestone. The score button allows team members to rate the creativity of a post which feeds
into the reputation of the original poster.
These are the just the basics, explore the system taking full advantage of the navigation menu and observe
what the Fall CS 4503 class has created. After exhausting the forum, we recommend exploring the highly organized
wikis within each project, these contain a majority of the documentation which the project teams
drafted while developing their individual prototypes within the projects. You can also opt to view the
video demonstration or
Video
Click here to view the video demonstration.Note: A flash player is required to view this video.
The video can alternatively be downloaded here.
SEREBRO Website
Click on this link to log in to SEREBRO 2.0 with your guest account.Login with your guest account information and assigned password.
Note: Use Firefox 2.0 or higher. If using IE, please use IE 7 or higher. Some buttons may not display clearly in IE.