MobiWork: Mobile Workflow for MANETs

The workflow model is well suited for scenarios where many entities work collaboratively towards a common goal, and is used widely today to model complex business processes. However, the fundamental workflow model is very powerful and can be applied to a wider variety of application domains. This paper represents an initial investigation into the possibility of using workflows to model collaboration in an ad hoc mobile environment. Moving to a mobile setting introduces many challenges as the mobility of the participants in a workflow imposes constraints on allocation of workflow tasks, coordination among participants, and marshaling of results. We present an algorithm that heuristically allocates tasks to participants based on their capabilities and mobility and discuss the architecture and implementation of MobiWork, our prototype system that allocates and executes workflows in an ad hoc mobile environment. An evaluation of the performance of our heuristic algorithm is also presented

Decentralized Execution of P2P Collaborative Processes

The growing importance of exchanges and collaborations in all business areas calls for fast, efficient, and flexible models of computersupported cooperation. As the traditionnal client-server paradigm is hampered by its structural limitations, the interest of the Information System Community is aroused by the promises of alternatives known as peerto- peer approaches. This paper introduces a generic architecture, P2P Coop, designed for the execution of collaborative business processes. Basic motivations of the model are discussed, as well as major contributions notably in terms of service-oriented routing and failure handling

P2P InterCoop: P2P-based Decentralised Inter-organizational Cooperation - Motivations and Requirements

As the global marketplace becomes more and more competitive, corporations often need to cooperate in order to utilize the best of their resources for achieving their common business goals. This kind of collaboration gives a corporation a possibility to use the capabilities of their business partners that they do not currently have. In addition, mergers, acquisitions, alliances, and market demands are some of the reasons why companies have distributed work across geographically separated sites. Although P2P systems are emerging as a new form of distributed architecture, the centralized architecture of the existing collaborative environments has major drawbacks. This paper presents a new architecture called P2P InterCoop for supporting distributed cooperative work; it identifies basic requirements, advantages and limitations

The challenges of staying together while moving fast

We report on the results of an empirical study conducted with 35 experienced software developers from 22 high-tech companies, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Intel, and others. The goal of the study was to elicit challenges that these developers face, potential solutions that they envision to these challenges, and research initiatives that they think would deliver useful results. Challenges identified by the majority of the study participants relate to the collaborative nature of the work: the availability and discoverability of information, communication, collaborative planning and integration with work of others. Almost all participants also addressed the advantages and disadvantages of the current "fast to the market" trend, and the toll it takes on the quality of the software that they are able to deliver and on their professional and personal satisfaction as software engineers. We describe in depth the identified challenges, supporting our findings with explicit quotes from the study participants. We also put these findings in context of work done by the software engineering community and outline a roadmap for possible future research initiatives

Collaboration/Coopération

Colloque avec actes et comité de lecture. nationale.National audienceLe travail coopératif assisté par ordinateur (TCAO) se développe de façon considérable ces derniers temps. Sous cet acronyme, sont rassemblées des activités très différentes dont nous proposons une classification. Nous montrons également des aspects importants tant technologiques qu'organisationnels et humains s'y attachant. Nous terminons par les orientations de recherche qui émergent actuellement

A virtual-community-centric model for coordination in the South African public sector

Organizations face challenges constantly owing to limited resources. As such, to take advantage of new opportunities and to mitigate possible risks they look for new ways to collaborate, by sharing knowledge and competencies. Coordination among partners is critical in order to achieve success. The segmented South African public sector is no different. Driven by the desire to ensure proper service delivery in this sector, various government bodies and service providers play different roles towards the attainment of common goals. This is easier said than done, given the complexity of the distributed nature of the environment. Heterogeneity, autonomy, and the increasing need to collaborate provoke the need to develop an integrative and dynamic coordination support service system in the SA public sector. Thus, the research looks to theories/concepts and existing coordination practices to ground the process of development. To inform the design of the proposed artefact the research employs an interdisciplinary approach championed by coordination theory to review coordination-related theories and concepts. The effort accounts for coordination constructs that characterize and transform the problem and solution spaces. Thus, requirements are explicit towards identifying coordination breakdowns and their resolution. Furthermore, how coordination in a distributed environment is supported in practice is considered from a socio-technical perspective in an effort to account holistically for coordination support. Examining existing solutions identified shortcomings that, if addressed, can help to improve the solutions for coordination, which are often rigidly and narrowly defined. The research argues that introducing a mediating technological artefact conceived from a virtual community and service lenses can serve as a solution to the problem. By adopting a design-science research paradigm, the research develops a model as a primary artefact to support coordination from a collaboration standpoint. The suggestions from theory and practice and the unique case requirement identified through a novel case analysis framework form the basis of the model design. The proposed model support operation calls for an architecture which employs a design pattern that divides a complex whole into smaller, simpler parts, with the aim of reducing the system complexity. Four fundamental functions of the supporting architecture are introduced and discussed as they would support the operation and activities of the proposed collaboration lifecycle model geared towards streamlining coordination in a distributed environment. As part of the model development knowledge contributions are made in several ways. Firstly, an analytical instrument is presented that can be used by an enterprise architect or business analyst to study the coordination status quo of a collaborative activity in a distributed environment. Secondly, a lifecycle model is presented as meta-process model with activities that are geared towards streamlining the coordination of dynamic collaborative activities or projects. Thirdly, an architecture that will enable the technical virtual community-centric, context-aware environment that hosts the process-based operations is offered. Finally, the validation tool that represents the applied contribution to the research that promises possible adaptation for similar circumstances is presented. The artefacts contribute towards a design theory in IS research for the development and improvement of coordination support services in a distributed environment such as the South African public sector

Supporting Collaboration in Mobile Environments

Continued rapid improvements in the hardware capabilities of mobile computing devices is driving a parallel need for a paradigm shift in software design for such devices with the aim of ushering in new classes of software applications for devices of the future. One such class of software application is collaborative applications that seem to reduce the burden and overhead of collaborations on human users by providing automated computational support for the more mundane and mechanical aspects of a cooperative effort. This dissertation addresses the research and software engineering questions associated with building a workflow-based collaboration system that can operate across mobile ad hoc networks, the most dynamic type of mobile networks that can function without dependence on any fixed external resources. While workflow management systems have been implemented for stable wired networks, the transition to a mobile network required the development of a knowledge management system for improving the predictability of the network topology, a mobility-aware specification language to specify workflows, and its accompanying algorithms that help automate key pieces of the software. In addition to details of the formulation, design, and implementation of the various algorithms and software components. this dissertation also describes the construction of a custom mobile workflow simulator that can be used to conduct simulation experiments that verify the effectiveness of the approaches presented in this document and beyond. Also presented are empirical results obtained using this simulator that show the effectiveness of the described approaches

Supporting Development Decisions with Software Analytics

Software practitioners make technical and business decisions based on the understanding they have of their software systems. This understanding is grounded in their own experiences, but can be augmented by studying various kinds of development artifacts, including source code, bug reports, version control meta-data, test cases, usage logs, etc. Unfortunately, the information contained in these artifacts is typically not organized in the way that is immediately useful to developers’ everyday decision making needs. To handle the large volumes of data, many practitioners and researchers have turned to analytics — that is, the use of analysis, data, and systematic reasoning for making decisions. The thesis of this dissertation is that by employing software analytics to various development tasks and activities, we can provide software practitioners better insights into their processes, systems, products, and users, to help them make more informed data-driven decisions. While quantitative analytics can help project managers understand the big picture of their systems, plan for its future, and monitor trends, qualitative analytics can enable developers to perform their daily tasks and activities more quickly by helping them better manage high volumes of information. To support this thesis, we provide three different examples of employing software analytics. First, we show how analysis of real-world usage data can be used to assess user dynamic behaviour and adoption trends of a software system by revealing valuable information on how software systems are used in practice. Second, we have created a lifecycle model that synthesizes knowledge from software development artifacts, such as reported issues, source code, discussions, community contributions, etc. Lifecycle models capture the dynamic nature of how various development artifacts change over time in an annotated graphical form that can be easily understood and communicated. We demonstrate how lifecycle models can be generated and present industrial case studies where we apply these models to assess the code review process of three different projects. Third, we present a developer-centric approach to issue tracking that aims to reduce information overload and improve developers’ situational awareness. Our approach is motivated by a grounded theory study of developer interviews, which suggests that customized views of a project’s repositories that are tailored to developer-specific tasks can help developers better track their progress and understand the surrounding technical context of their working environments. We have created a model of the kinds of information elements that developers feel are essential in completing their daily tasks, and from this model we have developed a prototype tool organized around developer-specific customized dashboards. The results of these three studies show that software analytics can inform evidence-based decisions related to user adoption of a software project, code review processes, and improved developers’ awareness on their daily tasks and activities

The ToxicFarm integrated cooperation framework for virtual teams

Developing a collaboration solution, that scales to an entire organization, that offers an integrated collection of cooperation tools, that is general enough to address a large range of applications, and that is easy to deploy for most people, is still an open challenge. This paper presents ToxicFarm services that are an integral part of a framework for hosting Internet virtual teams. The originality of this work is in providing a synthesis between contributions from different domains, including version management in software engineering, process management in data engineering, and awareness in groupware tools. The paper describes the overall services offered, discusses design choices for their integration and implementation, presents relations with existing work and describes their use in several emerging e-business application domains, such as e-finance, e-learning and e-telecom