Collaborative Coordination of Activities with Temporal Dependencies

International audienceBusiness process management and systems have been proven mature and highly beneficial in many domains. Recent surveys by leading market analysts say that the next challenge for BPM are unstructured processes. Based on a domain study in disaster response management, we identify current shortcomings of business process models and management with respect to unstructured processes. We develop a generic model for flexible temporal ad-hoc coordination of activities. Its focus lies on awareness and feedback as well as loosely structuring the process with temporal dependencies. It is implemented as an extension to the open Google Wave collaboration infrastructure. The approach is commented by commanders in the disaster management domain

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

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

OperA/ALIVE/OperettA

Comprehensive models for organizations must, on the one hand, be able to specify global goals and requirements but, on the other hand, cannot assume that particular actors will always act according to the needs and expectations of the system design. Concepts as organizational rules (Zambonelli 2002), norms and institutions (Dignum and Dignum 2001; Esteva et al. 2002), and social structures (Parunak and Odell 2002) arise from the idea that the effective engineering of organizations needs high-level, actor-independent concepts and abstractions that explicitly define the organization in which agents live (Zambonelli 2002).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Modeling and construction of coordination mechanism in computational environment

Orientador: Leo Pini MagalhãesDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Eletrica e de ComputaçãoResumo: Este trabalho aborda o problema da coordenação de atividades interdependentes em processos computacionais. As interdependências entre atividades podem ser temporais, de recursos, de bloqueio e de mútua exclusão, entre outras. Exemplos de processos computacionais com atividades interdependentes são ambientes multimídias, ferramentas de suporte ao trabalho colaborativo, workflows, vídeo games, animação computacional e composição de web services. Uma das dificuldades em projetar o mecanismo de coordenação é garantir que tal mecanismo seja consistente com a especificação do processo. Vários trabalhos sugerem o uso de ferramentas de modelagem como redes de Petri ou linguagens de coordenação para construir um mecanismo de coordenação. Um desse trabalhos apresenta a metodologia Grafo de Relações (GR) que trata das dependências temporais entre atividades. Esta dissertação apresenta uma extensão da metodologia GR para lidar com dependências de recursos, uma ferramenta para automatizar a modelagem do mecanismo de coordenação e uma proposta para o coordenador (componente de software responsável pela coordenação das atividades)Abstract: This work approaches the problem of coordination of activities in computational processes. The coordination necessity appears when there are interdependencies among activities. The type of interdependencies can be temporal, of resources, blockage and mutual exclusion, among others. Processes with interdependent activities occur in multimedia environments, collaborative work support tools, workflows, video games, computational animation and web services composition. One of the difficulties in designing coordination mechanisms is to guarantee that such mechanisms are consistent with the specification of the process. Some works suggest the use of modeling tools such as Petri Nets or coordination languages to construct a coordination mechanism. One of them presents the methodology of Relations Graph which deals with the temporal dependencies among activities. This work presents an extension for the methodology of GR to deal with dependencies of resources, a tool which automates the modeling of the coordination mechanism and proposes a coordinator (software component which coordinates activities)MestradoEngenharia de ComputaçãoMestre em Engenharia Elétric

Considering Human Aspects on Strategies for Designing and Managing Distributed Human Computation

A human computation system can be viewed as a distributed system in which the processors are humans, called workers. Such systems harness the cognitive power of a group of workers connected to the Internet to execute relatively simple tasks, whose solutions, once grouped, solve a problem that systems equipped with only machines could not solve satisfactorily. Examples of such systems are Amazon Mechanical Turk and the Zooniverse platform. A human computation application comprises a group of tasks, each of them can be performed by one worker. Tasks might have dependencies among each other. In this study, we propose a theoretical framework to analyze such type of application from a distributed systems point of view. Our framework is established on three dimensions that represent different perspectives in which human computation applications can be approached: quality-of-service requirements, design and management strategies, and human aspects. By using this framework, we review human computation in the perspective of programmers seeking to improve the design of human computation applications and managers seeking to increase the effectiveness of human computation infrastructures in running such applications. In doing so, besides integrating and organizing what has been done in this direction, we also put into perspective the fact that the human aspects of the workers in such systems introduce new challenges in terms of, for example, task assignment, dependency management, and fault prevention and tolerance. We discuss how they are related to distributed systems and other areas of knowledge.Comment: 3 figures, 1 tabl

Coordinating Knowledge Work in Multi-Team Programs: Findings from a Large-Scale Agile Development Program

Software development projects have undergone remarkable changes with the arrival of agile development methods. While intended for small, self-managing teams, these methods are increasingly used also for large development programs. A major challenge in programs is to coordinate the work of many teams, due to high uncertainty in tasks, a high degree of interdependence between tasks and because of the large number of people involved. This revelatory case study focuses on how knowledge work is coordinated in large-scale agile development programs by providing a rich description of the coordination practices used and how these practices change over time in a four year development program with 12 development teams. The main findings highlight the role of coordination modes based on feedback, the use of a number of mechanisms far beyond what is described in practitioner advice, and finally how coordination practices change over time. The findings are important to improve the outcome of large knowledge-based development programs by tailoring coordination practices to needs and ensuring adjustment over time.Comment: To appear in Project Management Journa