Dominique Decouchant

Groupware: Design, Implementation, and Use

Effective groupware toolkits not only make it possible for average programmers to develop groupware, but also enhance their creativity. By removing low-level implementation burdens and supplying appropriate building blocks, toolkits give people a ‘language’ to think about groupware, which in turn allows them to concentrate on creative designs. This is important, for it means that programmers can rapidly generate and test new ideas, replicate and refine ideas presented by others, and create demonstrations for others to try. To illustrate the link between groupware toolkits and creativity, I describe example toolkits we have built and how others have leveraged them in their own work.

Distributed pair programming on the Web

Pair programming is an extreme programming practice, where two programmers working sided by side on a single computer produce a software artifact. This technique has demonstrated to produce higher quality code in less time it would take an individual programmer. We present the COPPER system, a synchronous source code editor that allows two distributed software engineers to write a program using pair programming. COPPER implements characteristics of groupware systems such as communication mechanism, collaboration awareness, concurrency control, and a radar view of the documents, among others. It also incorporates a document presence module, which extends the functionality of instant messaging systems to allow users to register documents from a Web server and interact with them in a similar fashion as they do with a colleague. We report results from a preliminary evaluation of COPPER which provide evidence that the system could successfully support distributed pair programming.

Document presence notification services for collaborative writing

Instant messaging applications that convey presence awareness are quickly becoming some of the most popular groupware applications. They support lightweight and intermittent interactions that allow users to quickly move between a personal and a collective space, thus blurring the traditional distinction between synchronous and asynchronous systems. Often, however, the focus of collaboration is not another person, but a shared resource that is being produced in collaboration. Thus, rather than being interested in the presence and status of a collaborator, our main interest might be whether a given document is now available for one to read or review, or if such resource has changed since it was last visited. In this paper we describe Doc2U, a system that provides presence awareness of resources stored in the Web. We describe use scenarios that motivated its development and its current implementation as an extended service of a Web server. The tool forms part of the services currently being developed to support collaborative authoring on the WWW under the PINAS platform.

PINAS: a middleware for Web distributed cooperative authoring

Currently, the World Wide Web environment provides support mostly for single-user authoring and browsing. Even though initiatives such as WebDAV have been proposed, there is still no adequate support for cooperative authoring of WWW documents that deals with the unreliability of such a distributed environment. We present the PINAS platform which provides means for supporting cooperative authoring on the Web. Using cooperative authoring applications built using the services of this platform, several users can create shared Web documents in a consistent and controlled way. PINAS provides several interesting features, such as: author identification, document and resource naming, document composition and management, document replication, consistency and storage. We propose seamless extensions to standard Web services that can be fully integrated within the Web environment. In this way, a shared document can be edited using a distributed cooperative editor and be accessed, at the same time, from standard Web browsers.

AllianceWeb: cooperative authoring on the WWW

Currently, few applications provide support for collaborative work on the Web. This paper presents the way by which cooperative authoring can be easily and efficiently performed between authors distributed on the Web. The main goal is to provide support for allowing them to create common Web documents in a secure and consistent way. We present the AllianceWeb project whose goal is to extend the Web environment to support cooperative authoring of documents. It provides several features such as user identification, document and resource naming, document sharing and management, document replication and consistency, storage management. Our approach unifies both the hybrid and the fully distributed architectures for document storage and access. Although the architectures seem antagonistic, they are integrated within our system to allow distributed and temporarily disconnected cooperative authoring of Web documents. Our project builds on our previous experience on the design and implementation of Alliance, a cooperative editor of structured documents on the Internet.

Before Getting There: Potential and Actual Collaboration

In this paper we introduce the concepts of Actual and Potential Collaboration Spaces. The former applies to the space where collaborative activities are performed, while the second relates to the initial space where opportunities for collaboration are identified and an initial interaction is established. We present a characterization for Potential Collaboration Spaces featuring awareness elements for the potential of collaboration and mechanisms to gather and present them, as well as mechanisms to establish an initial interaction and associated GUI elements. We argue that by making this distinction explicit, and characterizing Potential Collaboration Spaces, designers of groupware can better identify the technical requirements of their systems and thus provide solutions that more appropriately address their users concerns. We illustrate this concept with the design of an application that supports Potential Collaboration Spaces for the PINAS web-based coauthoring middleware.

A Cooperative, Deductive and Self-Adaptive Web Authoring Environment

Related to the cooperative editing research domain and to the works currently developed on the World Wide Web, we present AllianceWeb, an editing and cooperative authoring system on the Web. Using this system, authors distributed among the world can cooperate producing large documentations in a consistent and concerted way. Taking benefits of the design and experiment of the Alliance cooperative editor on Internet, the AllianceWeb approach proposes a mixed architecture (hybrid and/or fully distributed) for the document storage and access. These two architectures are integrated to provide a concerted, secure and parameterizable cooperative editing support.

A Distributed Event Service for Adaptive Group Awareness

This paper is directly focused on the design of middleware functions to support a distributed cooperative authoring environment on the World Wide Web. Using the advanced storage and access functions of the PInAS middleware, co-authors can produce fragmented and replicated documents in a structured, consistent and efficient way. However, despite it provides elaborated, concerted, secure and parameterizable cooperative editing support and mechanisms, this kind of applications requires a suited and efficient inter-application communication service to design and implement flexible, efficient, and adapted group awareness functionalities.Thus, we developed a proof-of-concept implementation of a centralized version of a Distributed Event Management Service that allows to establish communication between cooperative applications, either in distributed or centralized mode. As an essential component for the development of cooperative environments, this Distributed Event Management Service allowed us to design an Adaptive Group Awareness Engine whose aim is to automatically deduce and adapt co-authors cooperative environments to allow them collaborate closer. Thus, this user associated inference engine captures the application events corresponding to authors actions, and uses its knowledge and rule bases, to detect co-authors complementary or related work, specialists, or beginners, etc. Its final goal is to propose modifications to the author working environments, application interfaces, communication or interaction ways, etc.

Empirical Evaluation of Collaborative Support for Distributed Pair Programming

Pair programming is an Extreme Programming (XP) practice where two programmers work on a single computer to produce an artifact. Empirical evaluations have provided evidence that this technique results in higher quality code in half the time it would take an individual programmer. Distributed pair programming could facilitate opportunistic pair programming sessions with colleagues working in remote sites. In this paper we present the preliminary results of the empirical evaluation of the COPPER collaborative editor, developed explicitly to support pair programming. The evaluation was performed on three different conditions: pairs working collocated on a single computer; distributed pairs working in application sharing mode; and distributed pairs using collaboration aware facilities. In all three cases the subjects used the COPPER collaborative editor. The results support our hypothesis that distributed pairs could find the same amount of errors as their collocated counterparts. However, no evidence was found that the pairs that used collaborative awareness services had better code comprehension, as we had also hypothesized.

PIÑAS: Supporting a Community of Co-authors on the Web

To provide efficient support for collaborative writing to a community of authors is a complex and demanding task, members need to communicate, coordinate, and produce in a concerted fashion in order to obtain a final version of the documents that meets overall expectations. In this paper, we present the PINAS middleware, a platform that provides potential and actual collaboration spaces, as well as specific services customized to support collaborative writing on the Web. We start by introducing PINAS Collaborative Spaces and an extended version of Doc2U, the current tool that implements them, that integrate and structure a suite of specialized project and session services. Later, a set of services for the naming, identification, and shared management of authors, documents and resources in a replicated Web architecture is presented. Finally, a three-tier distributed architecture that organizes these services and a final discussion on how they support a community of authors on the Web is presented.