A design recording framework to facilitate knowledge sharing in collaborative software engineering

This paper describes an environment that allows a development team to share knowledge about software artefacts by recording decisions and rationales as well as supporting the team in formulating and maintaining design constraints. It explores the use of multi-dimensional design spaces for capturing various issues arising during development and presenting this meta-information using a network of views. It describes a framework to underlie the collaborative environment and shows the supporting architecture and its implementation. It addresses how the artefacts and their meta-information are captured in a non-invasive way and shows how an artefact repository is embedded to store and manage the artefacts

Experimental Object-Oriented Modelling

This thesis examines object-oriented modelling in experimental system development. Object-oriented modelling aims at representing concepts and phenomena of a problem domain in terms of classes and objects. Experimental system development seeks active experimentation in a system development project through, e.g., technical prototyping and active user involvement. We introduce and examine "experimental object-oriented modelling" as the intersection of these practices

Design-time formal verification for smart environments: an exploratory perspective

Smart environments (SmE) are richly integrated with multiple heterogeneous devices; they perform the operations in intelligent manner by considering the context and actions/behaviors of the users. Their major objective is to enable the environment to provide ease and comfort to the users. The reliance on these systems demands consistent behavior. The versatility of devices, user behavior and intricacy of communication complicate the modeling and verification of SmE's reliable behavior. Of the many available modeling and verification techniques, formal methods appear to be the most promising. Due to a large variety of implementation scenarios and support for conditional behavior/processing, the concept of SmE is applicable to diverse areas which calls for focused research. As a result, a number of modeling and verification techniques have been made available for designers. This paper explores and puts into perspective the modeling and verification techniques based on an extended literature survey. These techniques mainly focus on some specific aspects, with a few overlapping scenarios (such as user interaction, devices interaction and control, context awareness, etc.), which were of the interest to the researchers based on their specialized competencies. The techniques are categorized on the basis of various factors and formalisms considered for the modeling and verification and later analyzed. The results show that no surveyed technique maintains a holistic perspective; each technique is used for the modeling and verification of specific SmE aspects. The results further help the designers select appropriate modeling and verification techniques under given requirements and stress for more R&D effort into SmE modeling and verification researc

Multi-Touch Table for Enhancing Collaboration during Software Design

Encouraging collaborative software design through the use of Multi-touch interfaces has become increasingly important because such surfaces can accommodate more than one user concurrently, which is particularly useful for collaborative software design. This study investigated the differences in collaborative design among groups of students working in PC-based and Multi-touch table conditions to determine the potential of the Multi-touch table to increase the effectiveness of collaboration during software design. The literature includes several interesting studies reflecting the role of Multi-touch tables in enhancing collaborative activities. Research has found that Multi-touch tables increase group interaction and therefore increase the attainment of group goals. Although many research efforts have facilitated collaboration among users in software design using Unified Modelling Language (UML), these studies examined distributed collaboration and not face-to-face collaboration. However, existing research that studied facilitating co-located collaborative software design has some limitations such as using technologies that prevent parallel design activities. Collaborative software design using Multi-touch table has not been widely explored. A structured literature review revealed that no Multi-touch collaborative UML design tool is available. Thus, a Multi-touch enabled tool called MT-CollabUML was developed for this study to encourage students to work collaboratively on software design using UML in a co-located setting. Eighteen master’s level students enrolled in the Software Engineering for the Internet module were selected to participate in the study. The participants formed nine pairs. The experiment followed a counterbalanced within-subjects design where groups switched experiment conditions to ensure each group used the Multi-touch table and PC-based conditions. All collaborative UML diagramming activities were video recorded for quantitative and qualitative analysis. Results show that using the MT-CollabUML tool in the Multi-touch table condition enhanced the level of collaboration among the team members and increased their shared contribution. It also increased the equity of participation; the individuals contributed almost equally to the task, and single-person domination decreased in the Multi-touch condition. Results also show that the Multi-touch table encourages parallel-participative design where both group members work in a parallel manner to accomplish the final agreed-upon design. The analysis of verbal communication shows that both experiment conditions encouraged subjects to use collaborative learning skills

A Design-Science-Research Approach

Neue Organisationsformen, wie evolutionäre Organisationen, bilden in vielen Kooperationsszenarien sozio-technische Konstrukte mit modernen CSCW Anwendungen aus. Daher erfordern Veränderungen dieser sozialen Systeme eine kontinuierliche Anpassung der technischen Tools an die neuen sozialen Konfigurationen. Diese Dissertation ist als Design Science Research (DSR) Projekt konzipiert und addressiert die folgende Forschungsfrage (RQ): “Wie können soziotechnische, evolutionäre Organisationen die Herausforderungen der joint optimization und des organizational choice während ihrer autopoietischen Veränderungsprozesse addressieren?” Die Fallstudie Viva con Agua de St. Pauli e.V. wurde mittels qualitativer und ethnographischer Methoden im Rahmen der entsprechenden DSR Zyklen untersucht. Das Forschungsprojekt fokussiert die Entwicklung von Artefakten indem sowohl eine technische, als auch eine soziale Perspektive eingenommen wird. Aus der technische Perspektive wird die RQ durch eine Microservice-Plattform adressiert. Die Architektur dient der Verteilung von Verantwortlichkeit für die Software in einem heterogenen Netzwerk von Entwickler:innen. Dabei müssen diverse neue Herausforderungen beachtet werden, wie etwa die Verteilung des User Interface. Durch die Betrachtung der RQ aus der sozialen Perspektive wird der USMU Workshop entwickelt. Dieses Artefakt dient der Verbindung der Charakteristika evolutionärer Organisationen mit agiler Software Entwicklung und mit Methoden des partizipativen Designs. Die Studien zeigen, dass beide Artefakte die RQ adressieren. Zudem konnte ich für beide Artefakte wertvolle Verbesserungsmöglichkeiten aufzeigen. Somit motivieren die Ergebnisse den nächsten Schritt des Projekts und die vorliegende Thesis wird Bestandteil des zyklischen Ablaufs eines DSR Projekts.The emergence of new types of organizational structures, such as evolutionary-teal organizations, almost always leads to the development of socio-technical constructs when it comes to working in collaboration with modern CSCW applications. A consequence of this is that the social system’s autopoietic change processes create challenges that compel one to adjust the implementation of the technical tool to the social system’s new configuration. This thesis is structured according to the design science research (DSR) approach and focuses on the research question (RQ): “How can socio-technical evolutionary-teal organizations address the challenges of joint optimization and organizational choice during their autopoietic processes?” For this purpose, the case study Viva con Agua de St. Pauli e.V. is investigated using a qualitative ethnographical approach during the DSR cycles. Addressing the RQ, two artifacts are designed from a technical as well as a social perspective. While the technical perspective primarily investigates the adjustments of technology, the social perspective focuses on the management of change in socio-technical evolutionary-teal organizations. I propose a microservice platform as an artifact that addresses the RQ from a technical perspective. The microservice architecture aims at spreading the responsibility for the software through a heterogeneous ecosystem of developers. The newly designed USMU workshop is addressing the RQ from the social perspective. It strives to intertwine the characteristics of evolutionary-teal organizations with agile software development and participatory design methods. In my studies, I examine the fact that both artifacts can be used to address the RQ. Additionally, I was able to identify valuable improvements for both of my artifacts. Hence, the project follows the lifecycle of a DSR project by reasoning through the results presented here for its next iteration

An investigation of constraint-based risk management for collaborative design

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.In the context of internationally challenging economic, design has been regarded as a key factor in assisting design and manufacturing companies to survive. By using up-to-date computer-supported technology, the global design collaboration based on multidisciplinary and distributed environment is becoming a mainstream to new product development (NPD). However, during the process of collaborative design, risk is rarely mentioned. In particular, due to the complexity of design process and lack of efficient design decision-making, there have been some design collaboration failures across multiple companies. Some design projects cannot deliver the benefits as companies have expected through the collaboration. Moreover, a number of stakeholders, managers and designers expressed their disappointment at not seeing the projected savings in cost and time, which critically discredited the value of design collaboration. Many studies in academia and commercial cases have suggested that risk assessment can be applied as an effective means in the realm of design. Nevertheless, few of them conducted risk management research associated with design constraints under a collaborative environment from both theoretical and practical perspectives. In current risk practice, many risk practitioners simply report key risks to their management teams and no further analysis, which might subsequently result in confusion with excessive discussions. Consequently, to prevent the failure of design collaboration and perform a satisfactory risk assessment, it is important to perform risk management with an upstream perspective and at an operational level. An approach, called constraint-based design risk management (DRM) where a conceptual framework has been proposed on the basis of collaborative design features, risk management process and Theory of Constraints (TOC). Moreover, a DRM matrix has been developed to map, measure and mitigate collaborative design risk through evaluating the critical design constraints, and then specified design risk variables in the light of risk criteria. Design constraints are quantitative parameters that frequently affect main design processes and decisions. The combination of design constraints and risk criteria can be accessible and applicable by designers and design mangers. In addition, a Bayesian weighting method based on Bayesian theorem has been developed to measure collaborative design risk in a more efficient manner. Ultimately, a DRM tool has been created as a simulated scenario prototype, which incorporated with three case-study evaluations, to demonstrate the importance and effectiveness of using TOC and risk theory in the realm of design collaboration