Effecting change: Challenges to building integrated and collaborative systems.

AbstractStudying large-scale collaborative systems engineering projects across teams with differing intellectual property clearances, or healthcare solutions where sensitive patient data needs to be partially shared, or similar multi-user information systems over databases, all boils down to a common mathematical framework. Updateable views (lenses) and more generally bidirectional transformations are abstractions to study the challenge of exchanging information between participants with different read access privileges. The view provided to each participant must be different due to access control or other limitations, yet also consistent in a certain sense, to enable collaboration towards common goals. A collaboration system must apply bidirectional synchronization to ensure that after a participant modifies their view, the views of other participants are updated so that they are consistent again. While bidirectional transformations (synchronizations) have been extensively studied, there are new challenges that are unique to the multidirectional case. If complex consistency constraints have to be maintained, synchronizations that work fine in isolation may not compose well. We demonstrate and characterize a failure mode of the emergent behaviour, where a consistency restoration mechanism undoes the work of other participants. On the other end of the spectrum, we study the case where synchronizations work especially well together: we characterize very well-behaved multidirectional transformations, a non-trivial generalization from the bidirectional case. For the former challenge, we introduce a novel concept of controllability, while for the latter one, we propose a novel formal notion of faithful decomposition. Additionally, the paper proposes several novel properties of multidirectional transformations.

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A Framework for Identifying Sequences of Interactions That Cause Usability Problems in Collaborative Systems

Electronics ◽

10.3390/electronics10040388 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 10 (4) ◽

pp. 388

Author(s):

Santos Bringas ◽

Rafael Duque ◽

Alicia Nieto-Reyes ◽

Cristina Tîrnăucă ◽

José Luis Montaña

Keyword(s):

Exchange Interactions ◽

Smartphone Application ◽

Collaborative Systems ◽

Software Support ◽

Shared Spaces ◽

Usability Problems ◽

Sport Betting ◽

Awareness Information ◽

Collaborative Activities

Collaborative systems support shared spaces, where groups of users exchange interactions. In order to ensure the usability of these systems, an intuitive interactions’ organization and that each user has awareness information to know the activity of others are necessary. Usability laboratories allow evaluators to verify these requirements. However, laboratory usability evaluations can be problematic for reproducing mobile and ubiquitous contexts, as they restrict the place and time in which the user interacts with the system. This paper presents a framework for building software support that it collects human–machine interactions in mobile and ubiquitous contexts and outputs an assessment of the system’s usability. This framework is constructed through learning that is based on neural networks, identifying sequences of interactions related to usability problems when users carry out collaborative activities. The paper includes a case study that puts the framework into action during the development process of a smartphone application that supports collaborative sport betting.

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