Gathering useful programming data; analysis and insights from real-time collaborative editing

Traditionally, collaborative coding has been practiced in open source communities where cooperation has mostly taken place on a coordination level. Nowadays, web technology is sufficiently advanced to enable collaborative coding in real-time as group work, which eases communication in software development. In this paper this phenomenon has been studied from a knowledge transfer and learning perspective. With the aid of two different example cases (code camps), we have examined the possibilities and challenges in learning during real-time group work. Additionally, we have evaluated the effect of the structure of log data created during software development. The research frame for this study is the utilization of log data visualization in evaluating group work and further improvement of the visualization in order to support software development.