Modeling awareness requirements in groupware: From cards to diagrams

Up to now, groupware has enjoyed a certain stability in terms of the users' technical requirements, being the awareness dimension one of its key services to provide usability and improve collaboration. Nonetheless, currently, groupware technologies are being stressed: on the one hand, the pande...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Bravo Santos, Crescencio, Duque Medina, Rafael|||0000-0001-8636-3213, Molina, Ana Isabel, Gallardo, Jesús
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2024
País:España
Institución:Universidad de Cantabria (UC)
Repositorio:UCrea Repositorio Abierto de la Universidad de Cantabria
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:repositorio.unican.es:10902/31731
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/10902/31731
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Awareness
Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW)/CSCL
Groupware
User requirements
Visual languages
Descripción
Sumario:Up to now, groupware has enjoyed a certain stability in terms of the users' technical requirements, being the awareness dimension one of its key services to provide usability and improve collaboration. Nonetheless, currently, groupware technologies are being stressed: on the one hand, the pandemic of COVID-19 has greatly driven the massive use of groupware tools to overcome physical distancing; on the other hand, the new digital worlds (with disruptive devices, changing paradigms, and growing productive needs) are introducing new collaboration settings. This, and the fact that software engineering methods are not paying enough attention to the awareness, makes us concentrate on facilitating its design. Thus, we have created a visual modeling technique, based on a conceptual framework, to be used by the developers of groupware systems to describe awareness requirements. This visual language, called the awareness description diagrams, has been validated in some experimental activities. The results obtained show that this is a valid technique in order tomodel the awareness support, that it is useful and understandable for groupware engineers, and that the visual representation is preferred to a more textual one in terms of expressiveness.