Anita Sarma is an assistant Professor at the Computer Science and Engineering Department the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. She received her PhD from Department of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. Her advisor was Professor Dr. André van der Hoek. She then completed a two year post doc at Carnegie Mellon University, School of Computer Science with Dr. James Herbsleb.
Anita's research focuses on understanding and facilitating coordination in distributed work, which involves both software development as well as other non routine intellectual team work. Her work lies at the intersection of Software Engineering and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). She seeks to understand how factors such as interdependencies among work artifacts, design erosion of the work product, and organizational culture affect coordination; and create effective coordination solutions for distributed development by identifying the kinds of information required for coordination, the means of generating and distributing such information, and ways to present it.
Her research interests can be broadly categorized into the following domains:
- Coordination and
collaboration in distributed teams
- Configuration Management systems
- Software maintenance and evolution
- Software visualization
Anita has designed and implemented several research prototypes, some of them being: Tesseract, a socio-technical browser that analyzes and captures both social and technical relationships among project entities and Palantír, a workspace awareness tool that enhances Configuration Management systems with awareness of parallel development activities and their effects on the local workspace. She has also been involved in the design, development, and evaluation of three other research tools: the Workspace Activity Viewer, Lighthouse, and the World View, which are still in their development stages.
