Description Jin Li 2003-05-06 14:44:12 EDT

When we ran usability testing of WSAD v5.0 (which is based on Eclipse v2.02), 
we were switching workspaces for our participants, since we had pre-made 
components/portions of the end-to-end J2EE Web app for our users to 
use/build/integrate/test. We didn't have a team programming environment setup 
(doing so would further complicate our experimental design for our study), and 
we didn't want to expose the complicated J2EE project properties/path setup to 
our users for the pre-made portion of the code. In addition, we wanted every 
participant to start at roughly the "same starting point", so that we can 
control and better understand problems they may encounter in the subsequent 
usability testing. So, we thought the easiest thing would be to switch 
workspaces. However, switching workspaces still didn't give us the easy way out 
since there were still hard-coded path info in the workspace, that we either 
need to fix up or match the exact installation drive/directory in the target 
machine.

I think one of the limitations that led us to this approach is that it was not 
easy to share/copy project properties, etc. in a peer-to-peer programming 
environment (even with CVS, I think some of the project properties cannot be 
shared easily), since we still have absolute paths, etc. information associated 
with projects/artifacts. If we can easily share/copy project properties in a 
peer-to-peer or team programming environment, we would probably start with a 
clean workspace, and ask users to import the pre-made components with the 
associated project properties, etc.