Arnaud Lewandowski

Inter-Activities Management for Supporting Cooperative Software Development

Systems supporting Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) are more and more omnipresent. As technologies continuously evolve, users are looking for new supports for their activities, which are intrinsically cooperative and imply many actors, distributed through space and time.

Tasks models merging for high-level component composition

As users become more and more demanding about the software environments they use, they need environments offering them the possibility to integrate new tools in response to their emerging needs. However, most high-level component composition solutions remain out of reach for users. Thanks to an innovative approach that tends to provide more understandable components, we propose in this paper a new mechanism in order to assist high-level component composition. This approach proposes to realize this composition through tasks models assembling. The assistance we propose is based on an adaptation of tree algebra operators and is able to automatically merge tasks trees in order to assist high-level component integration in a more global environment.

Enhancing support for collaboration in software development environments

Many studies have shown that collaboration is still badly supported in Software Development Environments (SDEs). This is why we try to take benefits from a theory developed in Social and Human Sciences, the Activity Theory, to better understand the cooperative human activities in which SD is realized. This paper particularly focuses on the experience crystallization principle to propose new solutions while enhancing the support for collaboration in the widely used Eclipse IDE.

Learning Software Testing Using a Collaborative Activities Oriented Platform

This publication describes a teaching initiative of software testing that makes use of a collaborative environment. Learning software testing is in fact a domain which needs practice in order to develop the necessary know-how. We led a project-based experiment with a collaborative environment of a new kind. We wanted to verify its ability to serve our particular learning context. In this article, after a quick definition of software testing, we discuss the problem of teaching software testing. We then present a project-based organization to teach skills dedicated to software testing. We describe the generic collaborative working platform we have used in our pedagogical context. We conclude with some results of an experiment.

Defining task oriented components

For many years, tailorability has been identified as a very important property of system design in order to take care of the emerging users needs towards their working environments. In the same time component-based approaches have been revealed as an interesting solution for tailorability, allowing dynamic integration of components in global environments supporting specific tasks. However, component technologies still face some drawbacks mainly due to a semantic problem. In order to palliate these lacks we propose in this paper a new solution that tends to merge tasks models, from the HCI research field, and existing component models. It particularly consists in a new design approach -- the Task Oriented (TO) approach -- supported by STOrM, a tool dedicated to the creation and manipulation of Task Oriented Components (TOCs).

Supporting Collaboration in Software Development Activities

Today, software development is intrinsically a collaborative activity and there is still a crucial need to provide adequate computer tools well supporting collaboration in such activity. Empirical studies have already identified some requirements to provide better collaboration-aware software development environments, and theories coming from human and social sciences still help researchers to better understand these activities. Founding our work on the activity theory, we present here some important issues that have been identified for creating better software development environments. Adding our experience, we particularly emphasize an aspect of human activity that has still not really been taken into account in creating these computer supports: the users experience crystallization and sharing. Finally, we propose an implementation supporting the identified properties in an existing and widely used software development environment

Gestion de l'inter-activités pour le support au développement logiciel coopératif

Software development is a cooperative activity, since it implies many actors. We focus on CSCW integrated global environments. Our study of existing platforms supporting software development activities points out their lacks in terms of tailorability and cooperative support. Upon previous results we obtained in the CSCW domain, we propose to extend the Eclipse platform, in order to offer a new support for software development by creating a cooperative context for the activities supported in Eclipse by each integrated plug-in.

A Framework for Experience Sharing Through Contextual Tagging.

The web is a knowledge-sharing place where many tools allow people to share their own experience about the resources they use. This shared experience informs about how resources have been perceived and involved in particular contexts. Such sharing is expected to help new users in building their own working contexts. Most of these tools involve a tagging system. Tags can help in navigating through shared knowledge, but tags also carry semantics that can help in understanding it. In this paper, we propose a literature review showing that tag semantics can only be fully understood while considering the context it comes from. Our assumption is that it is possible to better link tags to their creation context. We thus propose the EVOXEL framework, which relies on an activity-based structure and basic mechanisms that allow reaching this objective. We then discuss its capabilities, and provide first use cases we applied to test

Inspiring the Instructional Design Process Through Online Experience Sharing

A lot of pedagogical resources are available thorough the Web. Paradoxically, it is hard for instructional designers to discover and decide which ones will best fulfill their needs. End-users’ experience has been identified as a major source of information in the resource selection process. However, no solution totally fulfills the needs and end-users’ experience can hardly be browsed while being dispersed over the web. Our research prototype called EVOXEL can help instructional designers by completing current web solutions. Built upon ontological mechanisms, EVOXEL provides teachers a mean to share experience they have developed during their instructional activities. This experience is crystallized in the educational resources assemblages they have built. This experience can then be browsed, inviting others to be inspired from it.

A Fruitful Meeting of a Pedagogical Method and a Collaborative Platform

This publication describes the work done to allow the instrumentation of a pedagogical method named MAETIC on a collaborative tailorable platform named CooLDA. MAETIC facilitates the apprenticeship of professional skills in universities thanks to a collaborative project approach. This method has been described and modeled according to the CooLDA meta model. The resulting platform has been experimented during year 2007-2008. This article presents the scientific context of this work, the CooLDA platform and its underlying activity model, the MAETIC pedagogical method and the various associated to it students activities.