Doctor Of Philosophy / Department of Secondary Education / Diane McGrath / How does collaborative software help in the formation of a learning community? This study looks at the experiences of students in a first level Computer Science class as they use Manhattan Virtual Classroom (MVC). Although this case study began with the assumption that a learning community would form, it quickly became obvious that student participation in the MVC was a larger issue. The course chosen for this study was CSC-150 - Foundations of Computer Science, as taught in the Spring 2004 semester at a Midwestern university. Two traditional (face-to- face) course sections were given access to Manhattan Virtual Classroom for the purpose of discussions, comments, questions, and virtual office hours. Many students did not take advantage of this collaborative tool. Several reasons are considered, the reluctance of freshmen to participate (Goldberg, 1997; Carlson et al., 1996), professor teaching style, and student perceptions of their own contributions to the class. Several conclusions are drawn from this study how to increase student participation. These include better training in the use of the software, use of smaller groups within the Manhattan Virtual Classroom environment, clearly stated professor expectations, and a general adoption of this technology for other classes.

O trabalho busca o desenvolvimento de um método experimental implementado em um software Web voltado à tomada de decisão, abordando mais especificadamente os processos de levantamento de ideias e geração de alternativas. Referências teóricas foram utilizadas para subsidiar os elementos, processos e tecnologias do software frente à áreas de tomada de decisão e sistemas colaborativos. As principais ferramentas disponíveis foram analisadas sob o contexto de tecnologias abertas, tendo algumas características de resolução de problemas observadas. A proposta combina elementos do brainstorming em seu formato eletrônico e do método de apresentação de dados da tabela de estratégias, com referência nas funcionalidades de sistemas amplamente utilizados e que operam sobre a priorização das informações por pequenos grupos de usuários. Fundamentações teóricas foram desenvolvidas e funcionalidades chave destes sistemas voltados à resolução de problemas foram analisadas. Para fins de demonstração, um caso prático foi realizado no Instituto de Pesquisas Energéticas e Nucleares, com ganhos e limitações encontradas no processo do software e da prática empregada. com a finalidade de apresentar os ganhos e limitações encontradas com o uso da ferramenta. / The work seeks to develop an experimental method in a Web software focused on decision-making, addressing more specifically the processes of gathering ideas and generation of alternatives. References in theory were used to support elements, processes and software technologies over the areas of decision-making and collaborative systems. The main tools available were analyzed in an open technology context. The proposal combines elements of brainstorming in its electronic format and the data presentation of the strategy table, seeking functionality in widely used systems that operate on the prioritization of information by small groups of users. Theoretical foundations are developed and key features of these systems are analyzed with a problem solving focus. For demonstration purposes, a case study was conducted in the Institute of Nuclear and Energy Research, presenting the advances and limitations encountered in the software process and the practice that was applied.

O trabalho busca o desenvolvimento de um método experimental implementado em um software Web voltado à tomada de decisão, abordando mais especificadamente os processos de levantamento de ideias e geração de alternativas. Referências teóricas foram utilizadas para subsidiar os elementos, processos e tecnologias do software frente à áreas de tomada de decisão e sistemas colaborativos. As principais ferramentas disponíveis foram analisadas sob o contexto de tecnologias abertas, tendo algumas características de resolução de problemas observadas. A proposta combina elementos do brainstorming em seu formato eletrônico e do método de apresentação de dados da tabela de estratégias, com referência nas funcionalidades de sistemas amplamente utilizados e que operam sobre a priorização das informações por pequenos grupos de usuários. Fundamentações teóricas foram desenvolvidas e funcionalidades chave destes sistemas voltados à resolução de problemas foram analisadas. Para fins de demonstração, um caso prático foi realizado no Instituto de Pesquisas Energéticas e Nucleares, com ganhos e limitações encontradas no processo do software e da prática empregada. com a finalidade de apresentar os ganhos e limitações encontradas com o uso da ferramenta. / The work seeks to develop an experimental method in a Web software focused on decision-making, addressing more specifically the processes of gathering ideas and generation of alternatives. References in theory were used to support elements, processes and software technologies over the areas of decision-making and collaborative systems. The main tools available were analyzed in an open technology context. The proposal combines elements of brainstorming in its electronic format and the data presentation of the strategy table, seeking functionality in widely used systems that operate on the prioritization of information by small groups of users. Theoretical foundations are developed and key features of these systems are analyzed with a problem solving focus. For demonstration purposes, a case study was conducted in the Institute of Nuclear and Energy Research, presenting the advances and limitations encountered in the software process and the practice that was applied.

Software engineering is a fundamentally collaborative activity, yet most tools that support software engineers are designed only for single users. There are many foreseen benefits in using tools that support real time collaboration between software engineers, such as avoiding conflicting concurrent changes to source files and determining the impact of program changes immediately. Unfortunately, it is difficult to develop non-trivial tools that support real time Collaborative Software Engineering (CSE). Accordingly, the few CSE tools that do exist have restricted capabilities. Given the availability of powerful desktop workstations and recent advances in distributed computing technology, it is now possible to approach the challenges of CSE from a new perspective. The research goal in this thesis is to investigate mechanisms for supporting real time CSE, and to determine the potential gains for developers from the use of CSE tools. An infrastructure, CAISE, is presented which supports the rapid development of real time CSE tools that were previously unobtainable, based on patterns of collaboration evident within software engineering. In this thesis, I discuss important design aspects of CSE tools, including the identification of candidate patterns of collaboration. I describe the CAISE approach to supporting small teams of collaborating software engineers. This is by way of a shared semantic model of software, protocol for tool communication, and Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) facilities. I then introduce new types of synchronous semantic model-based tools that support various patterns of CSE. Finally, I present empirical and heuristic evaluations of typical development scenarios. Given the CAISE infrastructure, it is envisaged that new aspects of collaborative work within software engineering can be explored, allowing the perceived benefits of CSE to be fully realised.

This work is about achieving fault tolerance in real-time groupware implemented for theweb. These systems are often implemented using an architecture that involves a single pointof failure. The problem is the lack of solutions that solve this problem that can easily beapplied to implementations. The question is whether such a solution can be created and howit would perform. Some research has previously been conducted on this subject; however,the solutions proposed often have significant weaknesses and lack published results on howreliable the solutions actually are. In this work, a new solution is created and presented,which does not include the weaknesses as the previously suggested solutions. An experimentis conducted involving the implementation of a groupware application using common webtechnologies with the proposed solution applied and running simulations with fault injectionas to measure to what degree the solution is able to tolerate faults in different scenarios. Theresults show that the solution is able to achieve a higher fault tolerance.

This paper provides a report on the experimental collaborative and distributed development of a prototypic Widget-based PLE. The development process is described and detailed taking into account the requirements of a language learning scenario. First results are presented, and developer experiences are discussed critically with a focus on the development process as well as problems with current Widget technologies and interoperability.

This thesis "The Analysis of IT possibilities and utilization in teamwork on the school projects" deals with a problem of teamwork cooperation of the students of the University of Economics in Prague. The students worked on school projects, using information technologies. The introduction of the thesis deals with the basic theoretical knowledge of formation, functioning and team communication. Then some specification of collaborative software is given. Fundamental subject matter of the practical part of this thesis shows the outcome of a survey by questionnaire which analyses students' general view on teamwork. It is followed by the team origin aspect, organization of teams and the analysis of information technology possibilities and utilization in the cooperation of students. In conclusion the author makes some suggestions resulting from gained information on the school team creation and on the information technologies utilization in teamwork projects.

abstract: The coordination of developing various complex and large-scale projects using computers has been well established and is the so-called computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). Collaborative software development consists of a group of teams working together to achieve a common goal for developing a high-quality, complex, and large-scale software system efficiently, and it requires common processes and communication channels among these teams. The common processes for coordination among software development teams can be handled by similar principles in CSCW. The development of complex and large-scale software becomes complicated due to the involvement of many software development teams. The development of such a software system can be largely improved by effective collaboration among the participating software development teams at both software components and system levels. The efficiency of developing software components depends on trusted coordination among the participating teams for sharing, processing, and managing information on various participating teams, which are often operating in a distributed environment. Participating teams may belong to the same organization or different organizations. Existing approaches to coordination in collaborative software development are based on using a centralized repository to store, process, and retrieve information on participating software development teams during the development. These approaches use a centralized authority, have a single point of failure, and restricted rights to own data and software. In this thesis, the generation of trusted coordination in collaborative software development using blockchain is studied, and an approach to achieving trusted cooperation for collaborative software development using blockchain is presented. The smart contracts are created in the blockchain to encode software specifications and acceptance criteria for the software results generated by participating teams. The blockchain used in the approach is a private blockchain because a private blockchain has the characteristics of providing non-repudiation, privacy, and integrity, which are required in trusted coordination of collaborative software development. This approach is implemented using Hyperledger, an open-source private blockchain. An example to illustrate the approach is also given. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Software Engineering 2020

Originating in the theory of distributed computing, the optimistic consistency control method known as Operational Transformation (OT) has been studied by researchers since the late 1980s. Algorithms were devised for managing the concurrent nature of user actions and for maintaining the consistency of replicated data as changes are introduced by multiple geographically-distributed users in real-time. Web-Based Collaborative Platforms are now essential components of modern organizations, with real-time protocols and standards such as WebSocket enabling the development of online collaboration tools to facilitate information sharing, content creation, document management, audio and video streaming, and communication among team members. Products such as Google Docs have shown that centralized web-based co-editing is now possible in a reliable way, with benefits in user productivity and efficiency. However, as the demand for effective real-time collaboration between team members continues to increase, web applications require new synchronization algorithms and architectures to resolve the editing conflicts that may appear when multiple individuals are modifying the same data at the same time. In addition, collaborative applications need to be supported by scalable distributed backend services, as can be achieved with "serverless" technologies. While much existing research has addressed problems of optimistic consistency maintenance, previous approaches have not focused on capturing the dynamic client-server interactions of OT systems by modeling them as real-time systems using Finite State Machine (FSM) theory. This thesis includes an exploration of how the principles of control theory and hierarchical FSMs can be applied to model the distributed system behavior when processing and transforming HTML DOM changes initiated by multiple concurrent users. The FSM-based OT implementation is simulated, including with random inputs, and the approach is shown to be invaluable for organizing the algorithms required for synchronizing complex data structures. The real-time feedback control mechanism is used to develop a Web-Based Collaborative Platform based on a new OT integration algorithm and architecture that brings "Virtual DOM" concepts together with state-of-the-art OT principles to enable the next generation of collaborative web-based experiences, as shown with implementations of a rich-text editor and a 3D virtual environment.

Background – Leveraging external sources of innovation (ESI) is found to be vital for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) innovation work as they commonly suffer from a lack of resources to facilitate and execute this work. The interaction with the external environment does, in turn, enable access to knowledge and capabilities that SMEs currently not possess. Moreover, as collaborative software tools (CSTs) have proven to play a critical role in today’s innovation processes and have transformed the way of interacting with the external environment, it becomes obvious that research in this field must account for the usage of these tools. CSTs have a significant impact on communication, cooperation, and coordination and are, therefore, widely used to facilitate collaborations in intra-organizational groups. Thus, these tools can be beneficial for SMEs as it provides them with greater access and availability to the external environment. Purpose – This research aims to understand how SMEs can leverage external sources of innovation with the application of collaborative software tools and develop fruitful insights that can be used to facilitate innovation work for SMEs that typically lack internal resources.  Method – This study approaches the underlying philosophy of a relativist ontology, a social constructionist epistemology, and iterative grounded theory. For the methodology, empirical data was collected through 31 semi-structured interviews with participants from SMEs and their ESI in the region of Jönköping County following a purposive sampling method. The empirical data was further analyzed by conducting a grounded theory strategy for process analysis. Findings – We develop two processes illustrating how SMEs can leverage ESI with the application of CSTs. It was found that the application of CSTs in these processes enables SMEs to explore, acquire, and utilize information and knowledge from ESI in ways that previously have not been possible. By providing new ways of communicating and cooperating, CSTs facilitate the activity of sourcing knowledge and resources from ESI. Consequently, the SMEs are provided with new knowledge and resources that, in turn, improve and enhance the development of innovations. Thereby we contribute to an understanding of how SMEs can leverage ESI in the 21st century.