A decentralized architecture for software process modeling andenactment

Many development teams, especially distributed teams, require process support to adequately coordinate their complex, distributed work practices. Process modeling and enactment tools have been developed to meet this requirement. The authors discuss the Serendipity-II process management environment which supports distributed process modeling and enactment for distributed software development projects. Serendipity-II is based on a decentralized architecture and uses Internet communication facilities     

Gender and computer-mediated communication: group processes in problem solving

The study reports results from an experiment investigating aspects of communicative processes, using face-to-face (FtF) communication and computer-mediated communication (CMC). The latter was performed in two variants: participants writing under their own names or participants writing anonymously. There were two problems to be solved, both having ambiguous solutions. The theoretical aim was to determine if gender would influence communication equality, social relations, and communicative processes. Furthermore, private and public self-awareness was studied in order to identify differences between the media and between the sexes. The results show that participants discussing FtF were more private self-aware than participants in CMC, and females were more private self-aware than males. Females produced more messages in FtF communication than they did in CMC, and there were also more opinion change from females than from males. Social judgements were more positive from females than from males. A qualitative analysis showed that females expressed more opinions and agreements in FtF communication than in CMC, but also that they agreed more than males in responding to messages from a male. There were also more disagreements in FtF communication than in CMC.     

A field study of developer pairs: productivity impacts and implications

Pair programming purportedly delivers quality code with little productivity loss. The authors' field study, outside the pair programming environment, shows that two-person teams working independently are more productive than those working concurrently; agile methods may overcome inherent productivity losses of concurrent development. This research contrasts starkly with our field study findings. We decided to reexamine our earlier productivity data from teams of two and ask: Would our previous findings of concurrent-work productivity loss be reversed if we look only at programming pairs rather than teams of all sizes? If so, we could conclude that pairs are naturally more productive than larger teams, regardless of the collaborative process. If not, we could conclude that the collaboration mechanisms prescribed in pair programming might overcome a natural loss of productivity from concurrent work. We offer these findings and their implications as a benchmark against which we might measure the potential of pair programming practices.     

Skoll: A Process and Infrastructure for Distributed Continuous Quality Assurance

Software engineers increasingly emphasize agility and flexibility in their designs and development approaches. They increasingly use distributed development teams, rely on component assembly and deployment rather than green field code writing, rapidly evolve the system through incremental development and frequent updating, and use flexible product designs supporting extensive end-user customization. While agility and flexibility have many benefits, they also create an enormous number of potential system configurations built from rapidly changing component implementations. Since today's quality assurance (QA) techniques do not scale to handle highly configurable systems, we are developing and validating novel software QA processes and tools that leverage the extensive computing resources of user and developer communities in a distributed, continuous manner to improve software quality significantly. This paper provides several contributions to the study of distributed, continuous QA (DCQA). First, it shows the structure and functionality of Skoll, which is an environment that defines a generic around-the-world, around-the-clock QA process and several sophisticated tools that support this process. Second, it describes several novel QA processes built using the Skoll environment. Third, it presents two studies using Skoll: one involving user testing of the Mozilla browser and another involving continuous build, integration, and testing of the ACE+TAO communication software package. The results of our studies suggest that the Skoll environment can manage and control distributed continuous QA processes more effectively than conventional QA processes. For example, our DCQA processes rapidly identified problems that had taken the ACE+TAO developers much longer to find and several of which they had not found. Moreover, the automatic analysis of QA results provided developers information that enabled them to quickly find the root causes of problems     

Getting to know you: Face-to-face versus online interactions

It is an open question as to how impressions formed via computer-mediated communication (CMC) differ from those formed face-to-face (FtF). Some research suggests that judgments of others formed while interacting over CMC are more favorable than judgments formed in FtF, while other researchers argue the pattern is in the opposite direction. We sought to settle this conflict by examining impressions formed via each communication mode while controlling for the other. Participants interacted with a partner twice: once FtF and once CMC. When controlling for each communication mode, participants interacting FtF, formed more positive impressions of their partner than did those in the other sequence. Furthermore, FtF participants had greater self-other agreement then those who interacted via CMC. Implications for impressions formed over the Internet are discussed.     

Sampling and pooling of decision-relevant information: Comparing the efficiency of face-to-face and GSS supported groups

Past research has suggested that decision-making groups, when communicating face-to-face (FtF), suffered from information sharing biases that affected the quality of the final decision: they tended to discuss previously-shared information before they started to discuss information not known to all, and discussed more of previously-shared than unshared information. In our study we examined these effects in groups that interacted FtF or using a group support system (GSS). Four-member groups discussed a requirements elicitation task in which some requirements were known to all members before starting their discussion, while other requirements were known only to two members of the group. Both GSS and FtF groups exchanged a large percentage of the shared requirements. However, the GSS groups were more effective in communicating unshared requirements. On average, FtF groups discussed shared requirements sooner and unshared requirements later than did GSS groups. Our study also compared empirical results with predictions from an information-sampling model of group discussion in order to assess the effectiveness of the model in computer-mediated group communication.     

Keeping it together: The role of transactional situation awareness in team performance

It has been argued that communications in teams are a means of transmitting Situation Awareness to improve performance. This study explored the frequency and types of situation awareness transactions in two groups of teams. Twelve teams were grouped into either more effective or less effective teams, based on performance measures. Distributed Situation Awareness theory predicts that Situation Awareness transaction are a medium for co-ordinating teamwork, and that more of these transaction will lead to improved performance. Differences in the frequency and type of transactions were observed between the more effective teams and the less effective teams with the former having a higher frequency of overall communications and, more importantly, a higher number of relevant situation awareness transaction types compared to less effective teams. Situation awareness transactions supported the team in making sense of the situation they found themselves in as it unfolded and enabled team members to perform their discrete tasks and therefore contribute to overall team success.Relevance to industry: Teams are a major feature of most industrial applications of work and communication play an important role in coordinating team work. Communication has been found to be linked to both team performance and situation awareness. Situation awareness is distributed in teams through transactions of information. A study was devised to explore the differences between more effective and less effective teams on a number of situation awareness transactional factors. Analysing the team as a functional unit of situation awareness is presented for future work.     

Virtual team collaboration: building shared meaning, resolving breakdowns and creating translucence

Managing international teams with geographically distributed participants is a complex task. The risk of communication breakdowns increases due to cultural and organizational differences grounded in the geographical distribution of the participants. Such breakdowns indicate general misunderstandings and a lack of shared meaning between participants. In this paper, we address the complexity of building shared meaning. We examine the communication breakdowns that occurred in two globally distributed virtual teams by providing an analytical distinction of the organizational context as the foundation for building shared meaning at three levels. Also we investigate communication breakdowns that can be attributed to differences in lifeworld structures, organizational structures, and work process structures within a virtual team. We find that all communication breakdowns are manifested and experienced by the participants at the work process level; however, resolving breakdowns may require critical reflection at other levels. Where previous research argues that face-to-face interaction is an important variable for virtual team performance, our empirical observations reveal that communication breakdowns related to a lack of shared meaning at the lifeworld level often becomes more salient when the participants are co-located than when geographically distributed. Last, we argue that creating translucence in communication structures is essential for building shared meanings at all three levels.     

Expertise Recognition and Influence in Intercultural Groups: Differences Between Face-to-Face and Computer-Mediated Communication

Expertise recognition is challenging in teamwork, particularly in intercultural collaboration. This research seeks to investigate how cultural differences in communication styles may affect expertise recognition and influence in face-to-face (FtF) versus text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC). Using experimental intercultural groups, we found that in FtF groups East Asian experts had a lower participation rate, and were perceived as less competent, less confident, and less influential than experts from Western culture. No such differences occurred in CMC. The results support mediated moderation effect of perceived confidence on expert influence such that changes in perceptions of Chinese and American experts' confidence accounted for their different levels of influence in CMC versus FtF. No such effect was found with participation rate.     

Perceived enablers of 3D virtual environments for virtual team learning and innovation

Virtual teams consist of geographically distributed employees working with a common goal using mostly technology for communication and collaboration. Virtual teams face a number of challenges, discussed in the literature in terms of communication through technology, difficulty in building trust, conveying social cues, and creating awareness, as well as cultural differences. These challenges impact collaboration, but also learning and innovation. This research focuses on how a social medium, the 3D virtual environment, is perceived to enable learning and innovation in virtual teams. We study this through a qualitative study based on interviews of distributed work managers’ perception of VEs. The major findings are that VEs are perceived to create collaborative learning atmospheres for virtual teams in terms of enabling engagement, a shared context awareness, and support in social network building. Another finding is that VEs are perceived to enable team learning, knowledge development, and collaboration through persistence of content, information sharing, learning through role-plays and simulations, and visualization. Furthermore, VEs enable the development of co-created content as well as new ways of working in virtual teams.     

An agent-based approach to knowledge management in distributed design

The collaboration process among individuals with heterogeneous skills in a distributed virtual environment represents a crucial element of the extended enterprise. In order to achieve global optima in design, there is an increasing need for design teams to establish and maintain cooperative work through effective communication, co-location, coordination and collaboration at the knowledge level. Because of the distributed nature of users and information resources involved in the design process, the need for appropriate knowledge management tools is imperative. This paper proposes an agent-based architecture to support multi-disciplinary design teams that cooperate in a distributed design environment (DDE). Using ontologies and multi-agent systems (MAS), the proposed framework aims to optimise design process operation and management by supporting the dialogue among distributed design actors. Received: February 2005/Accepted: January 2006     

Process and technology challenges in swift-starting virtual teams

Virtual teams often face tight schedules and a need to start quickly and perform instantly. The goal of our study was to enhance understanding of the challenges faced by such teams. We used time–interaction–performance theory as the framework for following the processes and functions within virtual teams working on a systems development task. Our study provided a detailed examination of the group process, applied to virtual teams working under time pressure. The challenges faced by virtual teams in such settings showed that teams must work to enhance their effectiveness in multiple dimensions.     

On the Need for Mixed Media in Distributed Requirements Negotiations

Achieving agreement with respect to software requirements is a collaborative process that traditionally relies on same-time, same-place interactions. As the trend toward geographically distributed software development continues, colocated meetings are becoming increasingly problematic. Our research investigates the impact of computer-mediated communication on the performance of distributed client/developer teams involved in the collaborative development of a requirements specification. Drawing on media-selection theories, we posit that a combination of lean and rich media is needed for an effective process of requirements negotiations when stakeholders are geographically dispersed. In this paper, we present an empirical study that investigates the performance of six educational global project teams involved in a negotiation process using both asynchronous text-based and synchronous videoconferencing-based communication modes. The findings indicate that requirement negotiations were more effective when the groups conducted asynchronous structured discussions of requirement issues prior to the synchronous negotiation meeting. Asynchronous discussions were useful in resolving issues related to uncertainty in requirements, thus allowing synchronous negotiations to focus more on removing ambiguities in the requirements.     

Working Together Apart? Building a Knowledge‐Sharing Culture for Global Virtual Teams

A new impetus for greater knowledge‐sharing among team members needs to be emphasized due to the emergence of a significant new form of working known as ‘global virtual teams’. As information and communication technologies permeate every aspect of organizational life and impact the way teams communicate, work and structure relationships, global virtual teams require innovative communication and learning capabilities for different team members to effectively work together across cultural, organizational and geographical boundaries. Whereas information technology‐facilitated communication processes rely on technologically advanced systems to succeed, the ability to create a knowledge‐sharing culture within a global virtual team rests on the existence (and maintenance) of intra‐team respect, mutual trust, reciprocity and positive individual and group relationships. Thus, some of the inherent questions we address in our paper are: (1) what are the cross‐cultural challenges faced by global virtual teams?; (2) how do organizations develop a knowledge sharing culture to promote effective organizational learning among culturally‐diverse team members? and; (3) what are some of the practices that can help maximize the performance of global virtual teams? We conclude by examining ways that global virtual teams can be more effectively managed in order to reach their potential in this new interconnected world and put forward suggestions for further research.     

Students' Perceptions of E‐Mail Interaction During Student‐Professor Advising Sessions: The Pursuit of Interpersonal Goals

This study investigated students' preference for e‐mail over face‐to‐face (FtF) communication for interpersonal goal achievement (i.e., instrumental, relational, self‐presentational) with faculty advisors. An exploratory analysis of undergraduate students revealed that they did not prefer computer‐mediated communication (i.e., e‐mail) over FtF communication with advisors when addressing all 3 interpersonal goal types. Significant gender differences were also found, with women reporting more use of e‐mail, and men preferring to address self‐presentational goals in FtF settings. It also was found that compared to Caucasians, African Americans did not prefer CMC to FtF interaction in achieving instrumental and self‐presentational goals. Results of this study suggest that despite the ubiquity of e‐mail communication, undergraduates did not prefer e‐mail over FtF contact with faculty advisors.     

Meetings in a distributed group of experts: comparing face-to-face, chat and collaborative virtual environments

This paper focuses on Collaborative Virtual Environments, and their potential to support work meetings for geographically distributed experts. The research question concerns the difference between face-to-face-, chat-, and CVE- meetings with regard to efficiency, communication process, problems with the technology, enjoyment and competence development. A small group of experts were observed during their natural work meetings. Six of the groups scheduled meetings were held three times in a chat environment and three times in a CVE. Results suggests that chat and CVE meetings are experienced as more task oriented than face-to-face meetings, and that avatars support turn taking and are enjoyable.     

Conceptualizing and measuring the virtuality of teams

Virtual teams (VTs) are teams whose members do not share a common workspace all of the time, and must therefore collaborate using communication and collaboration tools such as email, videoconferencing, etc. Although the body of research on VTs is quickly expanding, to date, the field has yet to produce a comprehensive and coherent foundation upon which future research can be based, and empirical findings based on a substantive sample of real VTs remain limited at this time. This study fills a void in the VT literature with respect to defining and operationalizing the construct of degree of virtuality, and responds to calls for research that studies ongoing VTs, under real conditions. Data were collected from 30 VTs working in a Canadian technology‐based organization. Degree of virtuality was defined to include three dimensions: the proportion of work time that the VT members spend working apart (team time worked virtually), the proportion of the team's members who work virtually (member virtuality) and the degree of separation of the team's members (distance virtuality). The VTs in this study were found to have varying degrees of virtuality, and although the three dimensions were not highly intercorrelated, all were found to be significantly correlated to variables that have been previously linked to VT effectiveness. The correlations were all in the expected direction (negative), indicating that higher degrees of virtuality are associated with perceived decreases in the quality of team interactions and performance. The results of this research would suggest that the more that teams move away from the proximate form, the more the traditional measures of team effectiveness are negatively impacted.     

Trust,Performance, and the Communication Process in Ad Hoc Decision‐Making Virtual Teams

This research explores the communication process variables that potentially determine trust and performance quality in ad hoc virtual teams to better inform the choice of communication media for virtual groups engaged in decision‐making tasks. Results of a survey indicate that virtual copresence is significantly correlated with intrateam trust and the performance quality that teams achieve. Results also accentuate the prominent role of trust in the virtual collaborative decision‐making process; they indicate that trust mediates the relationship between virtual copresence and performance. It is therefore recommended that the efforts related to the design and adoption of communication systems for decision making teams strongly consider that virtual copresence potentially promotes both high levels of trust and high quality performance in virtual teams.     

An Efficient Stochastic Clustering Auction for Heterogeneous Robotic Collaborative Teams

Stochastic Clustering Auctions (SCAs) constitute a class of cooperative auction methods that enable improvement of the global cost of the task allocations obtained with fast greedy algorithms. Prior research had developed Contracts Sequencing Algorithms (CSAs) that are deterministic and enable transfers, swaps, and other types of contracts between team members. In contrast to CSAs, SCAs use stochastic transfers or swaps between the task clusters assigned to each team member and have algorithm parameters that can enable tradeoffs between optimality and computational and communication requirements. The first SCA was based on a “Gibbs Sampler” and constrained the stochastic cluster reallocations to simple single transfers or swaps; it is applicable to heterogeneous teams. Subsequently, a more efficient SCA was developed, based on the generalized Swendsen-Wang method; it achieves the increased efficiency by connecting tasks that appear to be synergistic and then stochastically reassigning these connected tasks, hence enabling more complex and efficient movements between clusters than the first SCA. However, its application was limited to homogeneous teams. The contribution of this work is to present an efficient SCA for heterogeneous teams; it is based on a modified Swendsen-Wang method. For centralized auctioning and homogeneous teams, extensive numerical experiments were used to provide a comparison in terms of costs and computational and communication requirements of the three SCAs and a baseline CSA. It was seen that the new SCA maintains the efficiency of the second SCA and can yield similar performance to the baseline CSA in far fewer iterations. The same metrics were used to evaluate the performance of the new SCA for heterogeneous teams. A distributed version of the new SCA was also evaluated in numerical experiments. The results show that, as expected, the distributed SCA continually improves the global performance with each iteration, but converges to a higher cost solution than the centralized SCA. The final discussion outlines a systematic procedure to use SCA in various aspects of the application of multi-robot cooperative systems.     

Meetings in a distributed group of experts: Comparing face-to-face,chat and collaborative virtual environments

This paper focuses on Collaborative Virtual Environments, and their potential to support work meetings for geographically distributed experts. The research question concerns the difference between face-to-face-, chat-, and CVE- meetings with regard to efficiency, communication process, problems with the technology, enjoyment and competence development. A small group of experts were observed during their natural work meetings. Six of the groups scheduled meetings were held three times in a chat environment and three times in a CVE. Results suggests that chat and CVE meetings are experienced as more task oriented than face-to-face meetings, and that avatars support turn taking and are enjoyable.