Evaluating groupware support for software engineering students

Software engineering tasks, during both development and maintenance, typically involve teamwork using computers. Team members rarely work on isolated computers. An underlying assumption of our research is that software engineering teams will work more effectively if adequately supported by network-based groupware technology. Experience of working with groupware and evaluating groupware systems will also give software engineering students a direct appreciation of the requirements of engineering such systems. This research is investigating the provision of such network-based support for software engineering students and the impact these tools have on their groupwork. We will first describe our experiences gained through the introduction of an asynchronous virtual environment ­ SEGWorld to support groupwork during the Software Engineering Group (SEG) project undertaken by all second year undergraduates within the Department of Computer Science. Secondly we will describe our Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) module which has been introduced into the students' final year of study as a direct result of our experience with SEG, and in particular its role within Software Engineering. Within this CSCW module the students have had the opportunity to evaluate various groupware tools. This has enabled them to take a retrospective view of their experience of SEGWorld and its underlying system, BSCW, one year on. We report our findings for SEG in the form of a discussion of the hypotheses we formulated on how the SEGs would use SEGWorld, and present an initial qualitative assessment of student feedback from the CSCW module

Reducing the effect of network delay on tightly-coupled interaction

Tightly-coupled interaction is shared work in which each person’s actions immediately and continuously influence the actions of others. Tightly-coupled interaction is a hallmark of expert behaviour in face-to-face activity, but becomes extremely difficult to accomplish in distributed groupware. The main cause of this difficulty is network delay – even amounts as small as 100ms – that disrupts people’s ability to synchronize their actions with another person. To reduce the effects of delay on tightly-coupled interaction, I introduce a new technique called Feedback-Feedthrough Synchronization (FFS). FFS causes visual feedback from an action to occur at approximately the same time for both the local and the remote person, preventing one person from getting ahead of the other in the coordinated interaction. I tested the effects of FFS on group performance in several delay conditions, and my study showed that FFS substantially improved users’ performance: accuracy was significantly improved at all levels of delay, and without noticeable increase in perceived effort or frustration. Techniques like FFS that support the requirements of tightly-coupled interaction provide new means for improving the usability of groupware that operates on real-world networks

On Consistency and Network Latency in Distributed Interactive Applications: A Survey—Part I

This paper is the first part of a two-part paper that documents a detailed survey of the research carried out on consistency and latency in distributed interactive applications (DIAs) in recent decades. Part I reviews the terminology associated with DIAs and offers definitions for consistency and latency. Related issues such as jitter and fidelity are also discussed. Furthermore, the various consistency maintenance mechanisms that researchers have used to improve consistency and reduce latency effects are considered. These mechanisms are grouped into one of three categories, namely time management, Information management and system architectural management. This paper presents the techniques associated with the time management category. Examples of such mechanisms include time warp, lock step synchronisation and predictive time management. The remaining two categories are presented in part two of the survey

Introducing Real-Time Collaboration Systems: Development of a Conceptual Scheme and Research Directions

This paper presents Real-Time Collaboration (RTC), a new and emerging type of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) system that has its roots in both the telecommunications and groupware market. The aim of the paper is twofold. First, it outlines the evolution of RTC systems and offers a conceptualization of RTC consisting of usage scenarios and four main building blocks - integration of communication channels, presence information, context integration, and further collaboration features. Second, in order to understand the organizational implications of this complex and socially embedded information system, the paper intends to offer a starting point for future research on RTC by touching upon and systematizing different directions and typical questions for researching RTC and its organizational implications

Using the Internet to improve university education: Problem-oriented web-based learning and the MUNICS environment

Up to this point, university education has largely remained unaffected by the developments of novel approaches to web-based learning. The paper presents a principled approach to the design of problem-oriented, web-based learning at the university level. The principles include providing authentic contexts with multimedia, supporting collaborative knowledge construction, making thinking visible with dynamic visualisation, quick access to content resources via Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), and flexible support by tele-tutoring. These principles are used in the Munich Net-based Learning In Computer Science (MUNICS) learning environment, which is designed to support students of computer science to apply their factual knowledge from the lectures to complex real-world problems. For example, students can model the knowledge management in an educational organisation with a graphical simulation tool. Some more general findings from a formative evaluation study with the MUNICS prototype are reported and discussed. E.g., the students' ignorance of the additional content resources is discussed in the light of the well-known finding of insufficient use of help systems in software applicationsBislang wurden neuere Ansätze zum web-basierten Lernen in nur geringem Maße zur Verbesserung des Universitätsstudiums genutzt. Es werden theoretisch begründete Prinzipien für die Gestaltung problemorientierter, web-basierter Lernumgebungen an der Universität formuliert. Zu diesen Prinzipien gehören die Nutzung von Multimedia-Technologien für die Realisierung authentischer Problemkontexte, die Unterstützung der gemeinsamen Wissenskonstruktion, die dynamische Visualisierung, der schnelle Zugang zu weiterführenden Wissensressourcen mit Hilfe von Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien sowie die flexible Unterstützung durch Teletutoring. Diese Prinzipien wurden bei der Gestaltung der MUNICS Lernumgebung umgesetzt. MUNICS soll Studierende der Informatik bei der Wissensanwendung im Kontext komplexer praktischer Problemstellungen unterstützen. So können die Studierenden u.a. das Wissensmanagement in einer Bildungsorganisation mit Hilfe eines graphischen Simulationswerkzeugs modellieren. Es werden Ergebnisse einer formativen Evaluationsstudie berichtet und diskutiert. Beispielsweise wird die in der Studie festgestellte Ignoranz der Studierenden gegenüber den weiterführenden Wissensressourcen vor dem Hintergrund des häufig berichteten Befunds der unzureichenden Nutzung von Hilfesystemen beleuchte

Frameworks for enhancing temporal interface behaviour through software architectural design

The work reported in this thesis is concerned with understanding aspects of temporal behaviour. A large part of the thesis is based on analytical studies of temporal properties and interface and architectural concerns. The main areas covered include: i. analysing long-term human processes and the impact of interruptions and delays ii. investigating how infrastructures can be designed to support synchronous fast pace activity iii.design of the Getting-to-Know (GtK) experimental notification server The work is motivated by the failure of many collaborative systems to effectively manage the temporal behaviour at the interface level, as they often assume that the interaction is taking place over fast, reliable local area networks. However, the Web has challenged this assumption and users are faced with frequent network-related delays. The nature of cooperative work increases the importance of timing issues. Collaborative users require both rapid feedback of their own actions and timely feedthrough of other actions. Although it may appear that software architectures are about the internals of system design and not a necessary concern for the user interface, internal details do show up at the surface in non-functional aspects, such as timing. The focus of this work is on understanding the behavioural aspects and how they are influenced by the infrastructure. The thesis has contributed to several areas of research: (a)the study of long-term work processes generated a trigger analysis technique for task decomposition in HCI (b)the analysis of architectures was later applied to investigate architectural options for mobile interfaces (c)the framework for notification servers commenced a design vocabulary in CSCW for the implementation of notification services, with the aim of improving design (d)the impedance matching framework facilitate both goal-directed feedthrough and awareness In particular, (c) and (d) have been exercised in the development of the GtK separable notification server

Organisational Implementation of Collaboration Technologies - an integrative review

The paper presents an integrative review of field-based research on organisational implementation of collaboration technologies. Based on a typology of collaboration technologies, findings from previous implementation research related to different types of technologies are identified and discussed. A taxonomy of implementation factors is presented, that may serve as the basis for further implementation research and development of implementation strategies for different types of collaboration technology

A groupware interface to a shared file system

Current shared file systems (NFS and SAMBA) are based on the local area network model. To these file systems, performance is the major issue. However, as the Internet grows, so does the distance between users and the Local Area Network. With this increase in distance, the latency increases as well. This creates a problem when multiple users attempt to work in a shared environment. Traditionally, the only way to collaborate over the Internet required the use of locks. These requirements motivated the creation of the State Difference Transformation algorithm that allows users non-blocking and unconstrained interaction across the Internet on a tree based structure. Fine Grain Locking, on the other hand, allows a user the ability to set a lock on a character or range of characters while using a form of the transformation algorithm listed above. This thesis proposes an implementation that integrates these two technologies as well as demonstrating the effectiveness and flexibility of State Difference Transformation. The implementation includes two applications that can be used to further research in both the transformation and locking communities. The first application allows users to create tests for SDT and Fine Grain Locking and verify the correctness of the algorithms in any given situation. The second application then furthers this research by creating a real-world groupware interface to a shared file system based on a clientserver architecture. This implementation demonstrates the usability and robustness of these algorithms in real world situations

Social Intelligence Design for Mediated Communication

Without abstract