Process Support for Cooperative Work on the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is becoming a dominating factor in information technology. Consequently, computer supported cooperative work on the Web has recently drawn a lot of attention. “Process Support for Cooperative Work” (PSCW) is a Web based system supporting both structured and unstructured forms of cooperation. It is a combination of the “Basic Support for Cooperative Work” (BSCW) shared workspace system and the Merlin Process Support Environment. The current PSCW prototype offers a loose connection, in effect extending BSCW with a gateway to Merlin. With this prototype we have successfully addressed the technical issues involved; further integration of functionality should not pose any real problems. We focus on the technical side of the PSCW system, which gives a good insight into the issues that have to be addressed generally in the construction of Web based groupware

Proceedings of the ECSCW'95 Workshop on the Role of Version Control in CSCW Applications

The workshop entitled "The Role of Version Control in Computer Supported Cooperative Work Applications" was held on September 10, 1995 in Stockholm, Sweden in conjunction with the ECSCW'95 conference. Version control, the ability to manage relationships between successive instances of artifacts, organize those instances into meaningful structures, and support navigation and other operations on those structures, is an important problem in CSCW applications. It has long been recognized as a critical issue for inherently cooperative tasks such as software engineering, technical documentation, and authoring. The primary challenge for versioning in these areas is to support opportunistic, open-ended design processes requiring the preservation of historical perspectives in the design process, the reuse of previous designs, and the exploitation of alternative designs. The primary goal of this workshop was to bring together a diverse group of individuals interested in examining the role of versioning in Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Participation was encouraged from members of the research community currently investigating the versioning process in CSCW as well as application designers and developers who are familiar with the real-world requirements for versioning in CSCW. Both groups were represented at the workshop resulting in an exchange of ideas and information that helped to familiarize developers with the most recent research results in the area, and to provide researchers with an updated view of the needs and challenges faced by application developers. In preparing for this workshop, the organizers were able to build upon the results of their previous one entitled "The Workshop on Versioning in Hypertext" held in conjunction with the ECHT'94 conference. The following section of this report contains a summary in which the workshop organizers report the major results of the workshop. The summary is followed by a section that contains the position papers that were accepted to the workshop. The position papers provide more detailed information describing recent research efforts of the workshop participants as well as current challenges that are being encountered in the development of CSCW applications. A list of workshop participants is provided at the end of the report. The organizers would like to thank all of the participants for their contributions which were, of course, vital to the success of the workshop. We would also like to thank the ECSCW'95 conference organizers for providing a forum in which this workshop was possible

Collaborative design : managing task interdependencies and multiple perspectives

This paper focuses on two characteristics of collaborative design with respect to cooperative work: the importance of work interdependencies linked to the nature of design problems; and the fundamental function of design cooperative work arrangement which is the confrontation and combination of perspectives. These two intrinsic characteristics of the design work stress specific cooperative processes: coordination processes in order to manage task interdependencies, establishment of common ground and negotiation mechanisms in order to manage the integration of multiple perspectives in design

Characterization and Classification of Collaborative Tools

Traditionally, collaboration has been a means for organizations to do their work. However, the context in which they do this work is changing, especially in regards to where the work is done, how the work is organized, who does the work, and with this the characteristics of collaboration. Software development is no exception; it is itself a collaborative effort that is likewise affected by these changes. In the context of both open source software development projects and communities and organizations that develop corporate products, more and more developers need to communicate and liaise with colleagues in geographically distant places about the software product they are conceiving, designing, building, testing, debugging, deploying and maintaining. Thus, work teams face sizeable collaborative challenges, for which they have need of tools that they can use to communicate and coordinate their Work efficiently

Design Ltd.: Renovated Myths for the Development of Socially Embedded Technologies

This paper argues that traditional and mainstream mythologies, which have been continually told within the Information Technology domain among designers and advocators of conceptual modelling since the 1960s in different fields of computing sciences, could now be renovated or substituted in the mould of more recent discourses about performativity, complexity and end-user creativity that have been constructed across different fields in the meanwhile. In the paper, it is submitted that these discourses could motivate IT professionals in undertaking alternative approaches toward the co-construction of socio-technical systems, i.e., social settings where humans cooperate to reach common goals by means of mediating computational tools. The authors advocate further discussion about and consolidation of some concepts in design research, design practice and more generally Information Technology (IT) development, like those of: task-artifact entanglement, universatility (sic) of End-User Development (EUD) environments, bricolant/bricoleur end-user, logic of bricolage, maieuta-designers (sic), and laissez-faire method to socio-technical construction. Points backing these and similar concepts are made to promote further discussion on the need to rethink the main assumptions underlying IT design and development some fifty years later the coming of age of software and modern IT in the organizational domain.Comment: This is the peer-unreviewed of a manuscript that is to appear in D. Randall, K. Schmidt, & V. Wulf (Eds.), Designing Socially Embedded Technologies: A European Challenge (2013, forthcoming) with the title "Building Socially Embedded Technologies: Implications on Design" within an EUSSET editorial initiative (www.eusset.eu/

Support for collaborative component-based software engineering

Collaborative system composition during design has been poorly supported by traditional CASE tools (which have usually concentrated on supporting individual projects) and almost exclusively focused on static composition. Little support for maintaining large distributed collections of heterogeneous software components across a number of projects has been developed. The CoDEEDS project addresses the collaborative determination, elaboration, and evolution of design spaces that describe both static and dynamic compositions of software components from sources such as component libraries, software service directories, and reuse repositories. The GENESIS project has focussed, in the development of OSCAR, on the creation and maintenance of large software artefact repositories. The most recent extensions are explicitly addressing the provision of cross-project global views of large software collections and historical views of individual artefacts within a collection. The long-term benefits of such support can only be realised if OSCAR and CoDEEDS are widely adopted and steps to facilitate this are described. This book continues to provide a forum, which a recent book, Software Evolution with UML and XML, started, where expert insights are presented on the subject. In that book, initial efforts were made to link together three current phenomena: software evolution, UML, and XML. In this book, focus will be on the practical side of linking them, that is, how UML and XML and their related methods/tools can assist software evolution in practice. Considering that nowadays software starts evolving before it is delivered, an apparent feature for software evolution is that it happens over all stages and over all aspects. Therefore, all possible techniques should be explored. This book explores techniques based on UML/XML and a combination of them with other techniques (i.e., over all techniques from theory to tools). Software evolution happens at all stages. Chapters in this book describe that software evolution issues present at stages of software architecturing, modeling/specifying, assessing, coding, validating, design recovering, program understanding, and reusing. Software evolution happens in all aspects. Chapters in this book illustrate that software evolution issues are involved in Web application, embedded system, software repository, component-based development, object model, development environment, software metrics, UML use case diagram, system model, Legacy system, safety critical system, user interface, software reuse, evolution management, and variability modeling. Software evolution needs to be facilitated with all possible techniques. Chapters in this book demonstrate techniques, such as formal methods, program transformation, empirical study, tool development, standardisation, visualisation, to control system changes to meet organisational and business objectives in a cost-effective way. On the journey of the grand challenge posed by software evolution, the journey that we have to make, the contributory authors of this book have already made further advances

Supporting collaboration within the eScience community

Collaboration is a core activity at the heart of large-scale co- operative scientific experimentation. In order to support the emergence of Grid-based scientific collaboration, new models of e-Science working methods are needed. Scientific collaboration involves production and manipulation of various artefacts. Based on work done in the software engineering field, this paper proposes models and tools which will support the representation and production of such artefacts. It is necessary to provide facilities to classify, organise, acquire, process, share, and reuse artefacts generated during collaborative working. The concept of a "design space" will be used to organise scientific design and the composition of experiments, and methods such as self-organising maps will be used to support the reuse of existing artefacts. It is proposed that this work can be carried out and evaluated in the UK e-Science community, using an "industry as laboratory" approach to the research, building on the knowledge, expertise, and experience of those directly involved in e-Science

Groupware Technology and Software Reuse

Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) is a research field concerned with the design and implementation of systems to support cooperative work. Such systems are usually called Groupware. Although Software Reusability (SR) is not commonly mentioned as an issue in the CSCW community, there are some obvious overlaps in design issues and methodologies.\ud In this paper I will argue that reusability issues are of particular importance to groupware technology and relate our experiences in this matte