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A Software Lifecycle for Building Groupware Applications: Building

1. Figure 2 3 The DISCIPLE framework DISCIPLE The DISCIPLE LWM99 framework shown in Figure 2 3 allows groupware applica tions to be built quickly by enabling single user applications to be made multi user by replacing the underlying java class libraries The application becomes multi user when loaded via the DISCIPLE loader with all Java user interface events sent to a col laboration bus The bus delivers the event to all connected application clients These clients then apply the event to their application resulting in a user interface state that is replicated in all clients This transparency allows for rapid development and adapting of existing single user applications into a simple multi user environment DISCIPLE is a replicated architecture where each client has an identical copy of the user interface objects This approach results in a strict WYSIWIS application limited the flexibility of the application while also reducing the complexity of building the application All user interface events are replicated in this architecture even those CHAPTER 2 RELATED LITERATURE 45 that are not relevant to the collaboration Dist View Dist View PS94 is another replicated architecture Instead of replicating the entire user interface a DistView user chooses a subset of windows to replicate to other clients in the system This set of windows can be changed at any point during the application run time The
2. a MOVE waste 3 to brg1 a e sbarge to barge i G a aS opy ace Insert Mode Overwrite Mode Delete Mode Copy l Figure D 19 The strategic planning window Strategic plans are made up of entries These are created by selecting an action filling in the particulars of that action and then placing that action in appropriate spot in the grid The action buttons are on the top of the window Directly below this is a palette used to fill out the particulars of an action Below this is a table that shows the strategy that all captains see At the bottom of the window are mode buttons that affect how you interact with the table When you click on an action button the palette located directly below the action buttons will change to reflect that new action Only the fields appropriate for the given action will be enabled At this point you may add the entry to the table immediately or you may fill out the fields of the action There are three ways to fill in a field First you may click on the field and type If you are typing a location you must type a valid location in the format 100 200 You may also type anything else you want to in this field but if you do the cross hairs marking the location of the object will not show up APPENDIX D VESSELWORLD USER MANUAL 238 Second you may copy an object from the Object list to do this first click on the field you want to fill in This puts you in Fie
3. A Figure 2 4 The GroupKit framework Flexibeans The FlexiBeans architecture and EVOLVE platform SHC99 provide an explicitly tailorable groupware framework A system is a set of components called FlexiBeans that are deployed to the user as though they were a monolithic application However the system retains its component oriented nature when it needs to be tailored or parts of it need to be reused The FlexiBeans architecture is based on the JavaBeans Jav03b platform A FlexiBean is a component with a set of well defined named access points called ports A port can either receive a message incoming port or send a message outgoing port An outgoing port of one FlexiBean will be attached to the incoming port of another This provides a circuit model NGT92 of communication Messages are brokered via the EVOLVE server A message will leave the outgoing port of the server and be sent to the centralized server The server will then deliver the message CHAPTER 2 RELATED LITERATURE 47 to the incoming port of an appropriate FlexiBean This is all done using Java s RMI Jav03c subsystem The EVOLVE server also serves as a component repository A FlexiBeans shell will connect to the EVOLVE server and receive the details and components it needs to run the system These details include the CAT file which specifies the neces sary components and how they interconnect and a JAR file containing the actual components Wren
4. Component Repository User Incoming Chat Component Identifier View Lookup Chat Communication Message Message Router Chat Communication Model Incoming Chat Communication Message Figure 3 7 A routing example in the chat room CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 67 and communication needs of a component By default in a system that runs on a single host and in a single process space all objects are contained within a single default node When multiple process spaces are taken into consideration multiple nodes exist A node is differentiated from another node via its component identifier called its NODE ID When messaging spans nodes the node identifier is also used in the targeted component s component identifier Some services such as the message router and component repository are per node services These services have one and only one instance associated with each node and each node needs to have one of these services within its process space All components associated with a node can access these services directly The precise make up of a node is defined in Definition 12 Definition 12 Given the node N a node is defined as N NODE ID SERVICES MESSAGE ROUTER ID COMPONENT REPOSITORY ID SERVICE IDy_1 SERVICE IDy COMPONENTS Cj C Cw SERVICES are the set of service components that the Node contains such as the message routing and the component repository The
5. Delete Selected S00 450 cluster Figure D 10 The marker list Mi Marker position 500 450 cluster Submit Figure D 11 Adding a marker window will pop up enter the label of the marker and submit it to VesselWorld For convenience it is also possible to click the Add Marker button in the lower left corner of the Control Center instead of clicking the Add button in the Marker List window Deleting a Marker via the List Click on the marker s listing in the Marker List Window That marker will be high lighted in the World View Clicking Delete Selected will then delete this marker APPENDIX D VESSELWORLD USER MANUAL 228 Current conditions calm 8 Predictions calm Figure D 12 The weather window Deleting a Marker from the World View Click the Delete Marker button in the Control Center Then click on the marker to be deleted in the World View D 2 5 Weather Display Clicking on the Weather button opens up the weather window display Figure D 12 This area provides information on the current and upcoming weather conditions in the area Keeping track of weather is very important as weather can seriously affect the capabilities of a ship The current weather is reported as well as an accurate prediction for the next step Weather is classified into five levels it will not change more than one level per step taken The levels have the following effec
6. 20 0 eee ee ee 125 6 2 Screenshot of the online research assistant 127 6 3 Screenshot of the RA scheduler ooa 128 6 4 Screenshot of the group crossword puzzle 131 6 5 Chart of projectidata srs viata oe et gh ee a ge ig a tis Sr a eee 132 6 6 Component and subsystem layout inORAv2 137 7 1 The waterfall software model o a0 a a a 141 7 2 The incremental software model oaa a a a a oe She Soe 142 7 3 The spiral software model sag aoa aaa a 143 7 4 The integrated software lifecycle ooa n a aaa a 145 7 5 The workforce application eee ek asa a 148 7 6 The SAGE replay application for the workforce application 149 7 7 The counterstrike application o oo a a te a 150 7 8 Layout of the component views in the counterstrike application 151 7 9 Layout of the component views in the workforce application 152 AT THYME objects sor a 8s ee Pte ek Re EE AS ee PR ie RS 172 A 2 Specification of the chat room 2 2 26 ak 4 ee eee 176 A 3 The component layout of the chat room 185 A 4 Class declaration for the chat room 0 186 A 5 Basic chat room receive method 2 000 186 A 6 Dispatching chat room receive method 187 A 7 Handler for chat room communication 187 A 8 Designated chat room constructor 0 0 0000 eae 188 AO Lor the chat client qos Bet Blew fegn is Uh ew edt 2 cE he
7. CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 10 1 2 2 Transcript and Replay in VesselWorld The production of complete replayable transcripts for VesselWorld problem solving sessions was accomplished through two features of the VesselWorld software A tran scription subsystem collected complete records of all user activity including both user interface level interaction such as mouse clicks and activity information such as sending a chat message The transcript is stored in text files that are easy to parse and process The replay system called VW SAGE consumes the VesselWorld transcript and displays it in a modified version of the VesselWorld application By using a modified version of VesselWorld instead of writing a new application the cost of adding the transcription and replay capabilities was signficantly reduced Interviews questionnaires and measurements of performance are all important characterizations of the effectiveness of user behavior From the designer s point of view however the availability of a reviewable complete transcript of the online community at work provided a highly significant class of information that enables the analyst to closely examine the online work and practice of the community A complete transcript of an online session of use captures both domain actions and user interface events It also contains information sufficient to recreate the state of the application at each point in time LA02 In a VesselWorld session a
8. must seal it Waste Barrels of toxic waste shown in Figure D 5 come in several sizes Small Medium Large and Extra Large They may require special equipment or joint activity in order to be moved Some waste is so bulky that it can not be moved by the cranes once it has been lifted and must be loaded directly onto a Small Barge for transport To identify the type of waste you must inspect it using the Info window described below Inspecting waste is critical You may find that special equipment is required or that some waste is currently leaking into the ocean and must be sealed before it is transported Waste barrels will also begin to leak if they are dropped or mishandled Who can i One Crane or both One Crane or both One Crane or both One Crane or both Both Cranes together Both Cranes together Extra Large 60 Both Cranes together Can not be carried APPENDIX D VESSELWORLD USER MANUAL 223 Figure D 6 A leaking barrel of toxic waste Figure D 7 The large barge Leaking Waste Leaking waste shown in Figure D 6 causes toxic spills These are blots on the environment that the team of ships is not equipped to clean up If a barrel of waste is leaking it may generate many dots of spill in its vicinity Also if a leaking waste is put on a barge without being sealed it will still spill into the surrounding area Large Barge brg The Large Barge shown in Figure D 7 is stationary and can always be se
9. oss software ibm com developerworks opensource jike Bonnie E John and David E Kieras The GOMS family of user interface analysis techniques comparison and contrast ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interaction 3 4 320 351 1996 Robert Johansen GroupWare Computer Support for Business Teams The Free Press New York NY USA 1988 BIBLIOGRAPHY 166 jun KF92 LA02 LAFIO1 Lan02 Lan03 lin LMC87 Lor77 LRO1 LS00 LWM99 mac Mica Junit testing resources for extreme programming http junit org David Kurlander and Steven Feiner A history based macro by exam ple system In Proceedings of the 5th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology pages 99 106 ACM Press 1992 Seth Landsman and Richard Alterman Analyzing usage of groupware Technical Report TR 02 230 Brandeis University 2002 Seth Landsman Richard Alterman Alexander Feinman and Joshua In trone Vesselworld and ADAPTIVE Technical Report TR 01 213 Dept of Computer Science Brandeis University 2001 Presented as a demon stration at Computer Support Cooperative Work 2000 Seth Landsman The Tiny THYMEr a manual for using the THYME framework Technical Report TR 02 231 Dept of Computer Science Brandeis University 2002 Seth Landsman Mobile groupware 2003 http boondock cs brandeis edu seth talks hdc fall2003 pdf Gnu linux operating system http linux com T
10. 1 set C CONTAINED IDENTIFIERS B I 2 route M to the set C RULE2 B 1 M 1 if the broadcast bus is set to rebroadcast to the sender route M to I 5 2 Discovery An assembler of a THYME application may not know the components and their identifiers prior to the complete assembly of the application This situation may arise for several reasons The set of components that may be part of the application are not known ahead of time because the components that are part of the application depend on external conditions A client application may also need to find services on the network such as other collaborators without knowing who is part of the collabo ration a priori This case is especially relevant in distributed multi user environments where different clients connect to form the complete application session Further the dynamic nature of THYME applications means that new components may be intro duced during the run time where the existence of these components could not be CHAPTER 5 DISTRIBUTING COMPUTING APPLICATIONS 118 known prior to their introduction into the application Due to these factors it is necessary for there to be a facility to discover components during the runtime of an application Discovery involves obtaining a set of component identifiers that map to compo nents that fit a specified discovery profile The discovery profile contains fields that specify properties of a component such as name capab
11. J LeBlanc and J M Mellor Crummey Debugging parallel programs with instant replay IEEE Trans Comput 36 4 471 482 1987 Raymond A Lorie Physical integrity in a large segmented database ACM Trans Database Syst 2 1 91 104 1977 Chris Lier and David S Rosenblum WREN an environment for component based development In Proceedings of the 8th European soft ware engineering conference held jointly with 9th ACM SIGSOFT inter national symposium on Foundations of software engineering pages 207 217 ACM Press 2001 Bev Littlewood and Lorenzo Strigini Software reliability and depend ability A roadmap In Proceedings of the 2000 International Conference on Software Engineering ICSE 2000 pages 175 188 ICSE ACM June 2000 Wen Li Weicong Wang and Ivan Marsic Collaboration transparency in the disciple framework In Proceedings of Group 1999 1999 Macosx operating system http apple com macosx Microsoft Netmeeting http www microsoft com windows netmeeting BIBLIOGRAPHY 167 Mich MLP79 MS00 MSBT04 Mus75 ncs03 NGT92 NS83 Off OR93 PMMH93 pow Sun Microsystems Infobus 1 2 specification Richard A De Millo Richard J Lipton and Alan J Perlis Social pro cesses and proofs of theorems and programs Communications of the ACM 22 5 271 279 1979 Emile Morse and Michelle Potts Steves Collablogger A tool for visu alizing groups at work In Proceedi
12. Ralph Hinken and Armin B Cremers Distributed component based tailorability for CSCW applications In SADS pages 345 352 1999 Ben Shneiderman Designing the User Interface Strategies for Effective Human Computer Interaction Addison Wesley 1998 The smalltalk programming language http smalltalk org H Sacks E Schegloff and G Jefferson A simplest systematics for the organization of turn taking for conversation Language 50 696 735 1974 M Satyanarayanan D Steere M Kudo and H Mashburn Transparent logging as a technique for debugging complex distributed systems In Proceedings of the 5th workshop on ACM SIGOPS European workshop 1992 BIBLIOGRAPHY 169 ST91 TAGT03 UM99 WDM99 Web Whi91 win YM92 L Suchman and R Trigg Understanding practice Video as a medium for reflection and design In J Greenbaum and M Kyng editors Design at Work Cooperative Design of Computer Systems pages 65 89 Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Hillsdale New Jersey 1991 S Taneva R Alterman K Granville M Head and T Hickey Grew ptool a system for studying online collaborative learning Technical Report CS 03 239 Brandeis University 2003 N Uramoto and H Maruyama Infobus repeater a secure and distributed publish subscribe middleware In Proceedings of the International Work shop on Parallel Processing pages 260 265 1999 W Wang B Dorohonceanu and I Marsic Design of th
13. The WREN platform LRO1 is a component based development environment CBDE that enables the assembly of a distributed application from a distributed component repository The component repository defines components as being communicated with exclusively through a set of well defined ports similar to FlexiBean s use of ports WREN components are self describing providing information about their use and how they should be used Through the use of component repositories components are discovered as they are needed Repositories provide an authoritative copy of a component allowing a component to be used outside of the repository only for caching purposes This technique is referred to as reuse by reference GROOVE GROOVE gro shown in Figure 2 5 is a peer to peer collaboration system GROOVE allows the developer to build collaborative tools on top of the existing architecture This architecture provides access to a rich set of groupware functions including ac count information synchronization information security and persistence While peer to peer GROOVE is a replicated architecture synchronizing informa CHAPTER 2 RELATED LITERATURE 48 Transceiver Transceiver Transceiver Figure 2 5 The GROOVE framework tion between clients at opportune times The interfaces of the users
14. crane2 400502 Large Not Le cranel 149 151 Small Not Le crane2 448 449 Small Not Le crane2 127 593 Small X Not Le tug 141541 small Located Not Le tug 141 541 Small i Located Not Le tug 141 541 Small Located Not Le tug Sun Feb 11 20 10 26 EST 2001 toggle zones toggle labels toggle chart poverena Current time 981940587535 Sun Feb 11 20 10 26 EST 2001 urrent round i S Annotations 981940587535 start of fourth round much of west side not explored start lt step lt play gt ff gt gt Go to bookmark Mi Add bookmark Go Next Round Mi Session Sun Feb 11 20 10 26 EST 2001 Time shome seth RESEARCH ExperimentData 981940226599 log xml ptart of fourth round much of west side nat explored Status forward Event Unknown Event goto next discard Open Chooser Open Annotations Sun Feb 11 20 10 26 EST 2001 Sun Feb 11 20 10 26 EST 2001 Figure 1 2 The VW SAGE system CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 14 Example Analysis As part of the VesselWorld experimentation several analysis sessions were conducted to determine how the application needed to be changed to better support the problem solving activity Further discussion of this analysis can
15. ditto Tugl just some shorthand or something for everyone so we know whats going on Cranel submitted third Tugl submitted Crane2 submitted third Crane2 Cranel load and then i ll do the same Cranel submitted load Crane2 ditto Tugl submitted move Crane2 hey i think that worked Cranel looks like it s Miller time I think we did it Figure 1 3 An example of VesselWorld dialogue CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 17 Lie Ly State of State of State of World Data Interface State of System State of Network 2 Figure 1 4 The subsystem interaction State of Logging Transcript the subsystem These front end components were known as the State components The central state component is the State of System which also acted as the central creation component providing access to other state components The layout of the basic client and its data paths can be seen in Figure 1 4 Each subsystem has components that are related to its function For example the State Of Interface subsystem holds the set of components that act as the user interface of the application client The layout of a typical subsystem is shown in Figure 1 5 Each subsystem component communicates with and through the state component Communication between components occurs through an event model based on the Java 1 1 event model Components are de
16. if REQUEST ACTION JOIN GROUP Cw1rpcer croup UCwrpcer croup WIDGET IDENTIFIER send newW idgetGrouping ResponseMessage CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 72 WIDGET GROUP WIDGET IDENTIFIER SUCCESS As part of developing the THYME groupware library a wide range of groupware widgets have been developed The remainder of this section details some of the implemented widgets Shared Scroll Pane The shared scroll pane is an example of a strict WYSIWIS widget This widget provides a UI object that extends javax swing JScrollPane When a widget of this type moves its scrollbar technically when an adjustmentValueChanged event is fired a SharedScrollPaneActionMessage is constructed and sent This message informs all grouped components to change their scrollbar positions ensuring that all shared scroll panes are showing the same portion of their scroll pane view at all times The shared scroll pane has one new message type the SharedScrollPaneActionMessage defined in Definition 17 The messages produced by this widget is the set SharedScrollPaneprop WidgetGrouping Request Message W idgetGrouping Response Message SharedScroll PaneActionMessage The set of accepted messages SharedScrollPane cc is equivalent to the set of messages produced by this widget Definition 17 The SharedScrollPaneActionMessage is defined as SharedScrollPaneActionMessage WIDGET IDENTIFIER WIDGET GROUP SCROLL PA
17. or to see APPENDIX A THE TINY THYMER 190 public void actionPerformed ActionEvent evt if evt getSource equals bSend send_comm else if evt getSource equals tfOutComm send_comm protected void send_comm CarbIF carb new ChatsCommunicationCarb ChatsCommunicationAction COMM_TO_ROOM tfOutComm getText getThId getLoginName sendToRooms carb tfOutComm setText Figure A 10 actionPerformed method for the ChatClient View what messages the receiver of these messages can receive In this case we know that the ChatRoom is looking for the RoomRegistrationCarb for a registering client and the ChatCommunicationCarb for passing communication Actions here are based on the user s interaction with the user interface The actionPerformed method which causes these methods to be sent out can be found in Figure A 10 Note that only message to unregister from the room is sent That is because the RoomClientAB superclass handles the registration Also note the sendToRooms that is called when sending a new message This is a wrapper to the send method provided by Room ClientAB which ensures that the message is sent to the appropriate room or rooms The last two items require the component to handle messages that it receives In this case we are looking for messages that are going to be sent to us from the ChatRoom specifically the communication utterances and the registrations which ar
18. providing a more gen eral solution to building groupware applications that produce complete replayable transcripts 1 2 1 The VesselWorld Platform and Its Integrated Lifecycle The problem domain encoded in the VesselWorld application has three participants engage in a computer mediated problem solving session To complete a set of tasks in this simulated environment the participants must communicate and jointly problem solve The only avenue of communication is via the application client Access to the environment and objects in the environment is also mediated through represen tations provided by the software application The problem solving sessions require cooperation coordination and collaboration A more complete description of the VesselWorld environment can be found in Appendix D There were two implementations of the VesselWorld environment In the origi nal implementation referred to as the base VesselWorld application participants can only exchange information using a text based chat room Replay was used to study the discourse and interaction providing insight as to what new collaborative tools would be most effective The re design of VesselWorld changed how the users col laborated by introducing special purpose shared representations called Coordinating Representations that were specifically designed to augment user interaction during recurrent activities The re engineered version is the adapted VesselWorld system
19. the framework conclusions can be drawn pertaining to how quickly the distributed component model can be learned how efficiently it can be used and how well the groupware technology behind THYME can be translated into actual use The HCI class is an upper level class taught in the Computer Science department at Brandeis University It was attended by all levels of students from Freshmen to Masters with the majority being Junior or Senior level undergraduate students The majority but not all of the students were enrolled in the Computer Science major or minor degree programs A significant minority of the students had no experience programming in Java This chapter discusses how the THYME framework described in previous chapters 123 CHAPTER 6 USE OF THYME IN THE CLASSROOM 124 was used by the class The parameters of their assignment are discussed and the types of systems they constructed within those parameters are described This chapter concludes with lessons learned from how the class used the THYME framework including where they ran into difficulties and where they were successful 6 1 The Term Project The class term project required teams of students to implement a same time different place groupware application The class was divided into teams of three or four students There were fourteen teams in total At the beginning of the semester a schedule was given shown in Figure 6 1 One feature of this schedule is that the
20. 46 The GROOVE framework 3 a ols ee Pee pe ee a SS 48 HE CHAE OOM lt s caus evo ond ed 4 if Nag ha ee ee 51 Chat room components a esc a ds wae ew eee we a eS 52 Layers of THYME libraries ates gn alae ae hla e Bae ae ai bers 53 Components and services o oo a 54 Messages data and identifiers 0 24 4 he uae Oe we POSS 54 Basic THYME component interaction 04 65 A routing example in the chat room 008 66 A non local routing example in the chat room 69 Message flow ina room application 0 4 78 The shared whiteboard 54 46 42 5 a oes ane Be ietleee ot BietAs 82 The shared browser ta xara ibd aig ek saan he ees Be he ee Gon 83 Theshared editi o oot A ahs hae Rhea gs ce Re Sock Bo he Soccd 85 The ORA application eS tek Sy ye eh Mats Ako e de Agee Se 86 The assembled composite application 87 The SAGE replay application for the online research application 92 Logging messages in a THYME application 99 SAGE playback controller 22 2d 2 s 6 ck oO a gOS ge 105 LIST OF FIGURES xi 4 4 The SAGE application generator o oo a a a 106 4 5 Leveraging a basis component in generation of the replay application 107 4 6 A sample discourse tagging ooo a a a a 111 AT Lifespan tool ip g eae Ee Be a oa hs T SE ee a BSS eg BAS 112 5 1 The node neighborhood for A 4 a ods ee ee oS We wees 120 6 1 Term project schedule
21. Bek het Bok ah he Boe Eee ks Behe SS Des WELSIOMM AD 5 ve Shoat ANS vate A Sf he Ake Md ee oe Ae de Ble Oe 6 Use of THYME in the Classroom Pols Phe Perm Project 1 0 by ace Staats Soar amp hop al ens Boe eee 3 6 2 Resulting Projects 4 sevds Mande deities at DRG oe as 6 3 Analysis e hena 2g Rote ek we As ok bo ek ie RS ee 6 4 CONCIISIONS sce etea ty eu Ge WE ee Oe hee Od dM Ako a 7 The Lifecycle Revisited 7 1 Software Lifecycles shee oy belek eye eS natn oboe 7 2 The Integrated Lifecycle of 4 4 ael dea an ee pe ee Ba 7 3 The Workforce Application 0 0 22 022 000 8 Summary and Future Work Gol Future Works ar t ou es es eet et ets So ee inp af ek ie eee S 8 2 Final Sta tement e s ged dite Mek dle Bed os ae ance alee ae A The Tiny THYMEr A T Tntrodtction siae Gd tu a 8 OE A RPAH Be OO a RIS a OES A2 CONCEPTS 4 gaia fae ee AS en a ee eee Ee owe a eee A 3 Your Application alk a ato kl eB Rl A hh RD HE Bat BS B Source Code to the ORA Application B 1 package Oran 2s on 6 ecto 8 s atte Ss aah ds ee ek a 8 B 2 package orav2 bloc 12s 2 be Gory ee he See ee ee tle eee Pele oe B 3 package orav2 iface 262s ain ee aia ce ke ait ae SCR ES Se BA ORAv2 specification files 40g we ea Eek Boe Ge Boe C The THYME Widget Tutorial C I Introd cti n e i pt ect a tk OG Sek Sk GG DE PS SZ Bre vb SDS C 2 About Ehe Tutorials sc oar he ery ees Eee yom BY Sue He BY Eee ou C 3 Introduction To
22. DistView collaboration is a type of relaxed WYSIWIS with some windows being shared and others not Any window that is shared is strict WYSIWIS while those windows that are not shared are completely private GroupKit The GroupKit RG92 framework shown in Figure 2 4 provides libraries in Tcl Tk that allow a developer to build conference based groupware applications This ap proach is heavily client server based where the conference acts as the collaboration server A conference is created which can be generic meaning that little if any developer work is involved in making a conference for a particular application or ses sion Each participant in the groupware session connects to this conference with their groupware client Communication between clients is mediated through this confer ence at all times GroupKit provides several general purpose callback methods to get and send information to and from other connected clients These methods allow one client to call a method on any other client all other clients or all clients including the calling client GroupKit also provides per client data structures available to all participating clients which allows a client to expose information about itself to other clients easily such as login name pen color and application specific data CHAPTER 2 RELATED LITERATURE 46 Server
23. Dprop E prop COMP SIMILAR D E Dacc Eiacc and Dprop Eprop CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 61 Two components are equivalent if they are the same component This property refers to a language level equivalence i e the same object or same memory location not just a class based equivalence This property is defined in 5 Definition 5 Given two components D and E D and E are equivalent if D E and E D and is defined as a language level object equals operator COMP EQUIV D E D E and E D The property of orthogonality refers to whether or not two components can directly interact If two components do not have overlap in their acceptance and production properties they will not interact as defined in Definition 6 Orthogonality of compos ite components holds when all constituent components of both composite components are orthogonal see Definition 7 Two composite components that are orthogonal to each other can be used in the same application with limited interaction Definition 6 Given two components D and E D and E are orthogonal if ORTH COMP D E N Dacc Eproa and N Dproa Lace Definition 7 Given two composite components S and T S and T are orthogonal if ORTH COMPOSITE S T VYp E S Yp D E T ORTH COMP E D Orthogonality does not replace due diligence of the developer in verifying cor rect behavior of the system Two components that are orthogonal may
24. HR wells HR Bee 1 5 Organization of the Thesis 2 aise oh ok iss eh a Pe Related Literature 2 1 Groupware Applications dca ecw Bos ee oo aw oe eae ee 2 2 Analysis of Groupware Use 0 02 0002 eee 2 3 Engineering the Groupware Application 24 The Remainder of the Thesis 65 4 a6 444 48 Bd AS A Ao le Building Groupware Applications 3 1 Distributed Component Model a aaa 3 2 Groupware Components 2 5 6 Sahat BE Senha eB 4 eee ee By Sek Hee Ged 3 3 Case Study Building a Groupware System Using THYME SA Conclusions s poco a Sy seo 12 ae pay She os Se iS or Aa en BR vee he oe Observational Analysis of Groupware Applications 4 1 Online Research Application 2 0002 004 4 2 Example Analysis with ORA y 4 4 ac 24a oot ee oe ee a 4 3 Transcription and Replay Revisited 4 4 Supporting Online Ethnographic Analysis Using THYME and SAGE 4 5 Generating the Replay Application 4 6 Other Visualization Techniques 0202 AT Conclusions 44 562 AA Veo ae dy lathe white Ueda A ALG Ae ed ae Ae Sa Distributing Computing Applications 5 1 Multi Component Routing 222 2 4a e eins ee Se a ee Sk 9 2 ADISCOVEDY sa audit oy a 3 he Oe Se he he Boy hee eas Ado Geeks Bho SH viii vi 28 29 34 40 48 50 53 68 85 88 CONTENTS 5 3 Transcription Support 720 2 4 e e elds ee eae ON Baek en ek JA r WONGCIISIOM 2 5 tho ws Abode a
25. NICATION TO ROOM CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 81 In the COSI 125 class discussed in Chapter 6 enhancements were made to the basic chat room component collection For example the ability to whisper or send communication to one other user not to everyone in the room was added This feature was implemented by altering the chat communication message to include a field for the targeted user and altering the room to only rebroadcast the message to the sending user and targeted user Also added was the addition of emoticons graphical representations of certain text combinations such as being interpreted as a smiley face This feature was implemented by sub classing the incoming chat view component to parse each line of text and insert an icon where appropriate replacing the text Shared Whiteboard The shared whiteboard presents a shared surface and set of artifacts that can be placed and altered on the canvas The artifacts on the canvas are replicated on all canvases that are attached to the same room The component collection contains two view components one for the palette of artifact types and one for the canvas The palette is populated at run time with the list of available artifacts and canvas manipulated actions such as DELETE and SE LECT The canvas responds to mouse actions based on where the mouse is clicked the status of the palette and the internal status of the canvas For example if the p
26. Research Assistant ORA is a THYME application that was assem bled by a group of students in the COSI 125 class discussed in Chapter 6 The goal of this application was to provide the ability for two or more people to collaboratively research a topic on the world wide web As shown in Figure 3 13 there are two major visual components the browser on the left and the chat room on the right The browser is from the shared web browser component collection with the Browser View being placed inside an instance of the SharedScrollPanel widget and the EntryView below it The browser is overlayed in a drawing layer by the CanvasView of the Shared Whiteboard The browser and the drawing layer are kept synchronized by having them both placed in the same SharedScrollPanel The right side of the screen is the incoming and outgoing chat views A bob hi bob l m trying to find a paper on the spiral model of software engineering fred try citeseer com bob know about the boehm paper I m looking for more recent work fred how about this one development and enhancement JEEE liege ics uci cdu pub ziv rebus_pap bob that looks right I ll start there BACK FORWARD STOP HOME ana http citeseer nj nec com cs Quit DL Client List X Chooser FREE_DRAW RECTANGLE OVAL EMPTY LINE CLEAR_ALL CLEAR_LOCAL Quit Client List Chooser Figure 3 13 The ORA application The a
27. RoomRegistrationCarb Communication utterances are sent from the client to the room The room then ensures that they are distributed to all clients These messages are encapsulated in the ChatCommunicationCarb To build the actual component we determine what the component needs to sub class what capabilities it will implement and what roles it will fulfill In the case of the ChatRoom it will extend tcc bloc RoomAB the abstract implementation of the THYME Room It will only implement the Bloc capability implicitly based on its extension of RoomAB and fullfil the Room role again implicitly based on its extension of RoomAB The class declaration of the ChatRoom can be seen in Figure A 4 The ChatRoom component like most THYME components is driven by the receive method In this method the messages are received and processed by the component as they are sent to the receiving component from another component The two messages that the ChatRoom receives are the RoomRegistrationCarb and the ChatCommunicationCarb See Figure A 5 APPENDIX A THE TINY THYMER 187 public void receive CarbIF carb ThId source if carb instanceof ChatsCommunicationCarb handleChatsCommunication ChatsCommunicationCarb carb source Figure A 6 Dispatching chat room receive method protected void handleChatsCommunication ChatsCommunicationCarb carb ThId source if carb getActionType equals ChatsCommunicationAction COMM_TO_ROOM se
28. String ID Id ora source code appendix tex 161 2005 08 07 12 42 12Z seth protected JToggleButton bToggle public ORAView ThId id Collection args super id args public void onInit makeUI F protected void makeUI GroupwareManagerCIF gm GroupwareManagerAB getExistingManager SwingWidgetFactoryCIF wf gm getSwingWidgetFactory pMain wf createPanel pMain setLayout new BorderLayout pMain add make_left_panel BorderLayout CENTER pMain add make_right_panel BorderLayout EAST pMain add make_bottom_panel BorderLayout SOUTH setSWBOn J protected ViewRIF getBrowserView return ViewRIF getBlocManager getBloc browser view getThId getInstanceId protected ViewRIF getToolbarView return ViewRIF getBlocManager getBloc toolbar view getThId getInstanceId 198 APPENDIX B SOURCE CODE TO THE ORA APPLICATION 199 protected SWBManagerCIF getSWBManager return SWBManagerAB getExistingManager protected ViewRIF getSWBCanvasView return getSWBManager getCanvas protected ViewRIF getPaletteView return ViewRIF getBlocManager getBloc swb palette view getThId getInstancelId protected ViewRIF getRoomAccessView ViewRIF room_access ViewRIF getBlocManager getBloc room access view getThId getInstanceld return room_access protected JComponent make_left_panel RoomClientCIF rc
29. THE TINY THYMER 189 O O O foo ReferenceRouterDataChannelid node 1035239022495 777622 NOTIFICATION successfully joined foo blah foo foo foo foo foo TIFICATION seth has joined foo hi there Send Go To Chooser Quit x Figure A 9 UI for the chat client In the case of the ChatClientView it will extend the tcc role RoomClientAB It will fulfill the VisibleView role which is a type of View A picture of the user interface for the chat client can be seen in Figure A 9 The send button is named bSend The quit button is named bQuit The text field on the bottom is named tfOutgoingComm The text area in the middle is named talncomingComm The GUI is set up using the Java Swing toolkit tfOutgoingComm bSend and bQuit all use the component itself as an action listener The code to build the GUI can be found in the ChatClient View class itself and will not be reproduced here Similar to the ChatRoom the ChatClient View has the following responsibilities 1 Present a UI for the user to interact with the chat room 2 Registering and unregistering itself from the chat room 3 Sending communication utterances from the client to the room 4 Receiving communication utterances from the room 5 Receiving registration of other users from the room The second two items require the component to send out messages This requires the developer of the component to define the messages that are to be sent
30. THYME component collection provides capabilities that aid in the construction of complex distributed applications Buses provide additional loose coupling tech niques to allow interaction with channels of information instead of the components themselves Discovery allows components to be interacted with by their properties and capabilities instead of the specific type of component It also allows the ap plication to be assembled at run time based on the needs of the application and CHAPTER 5 DISTRIBUTING COMPUTING APPLICATIONS 122 application clients Finally techniques such as the widget factory give additional support to the transcription capabilities of the THYME framework In the next chapter THYME and SAGE are shown in use as they were used in a Human Computer Interaction class taught at Brandeis University 5 5 Version Id distributed computing components tex2792005 11 1602 49 40Zseth Chapter 6 Use of THYME in the Classroom As the online ethnographic analysis concepts matured it became necessary to explore whether or not the rapid development redevelopment and transcript capabilities could be used by non experts As a way of testing these capabilities in the Fall of 2002 a Human Computer Interaction HCI class held at Brandeis University used the THYME framework to implement their term projects which called for them to implement synchronous groupware applications In analyzing how the class used
31. The second activity was to develop analysis tech niques that may be applied to the transcripts of user behavior that were constructed using this platform FA03 The last was concerned with adding adaptive components to groupware applications IA03 The remainder of this section will discuss the VesselWorld platform how it per sonified an early implementation of online ethnographic analysis and the integrated lifecycle and how the approach to building analyzable groupware applications evolved as the limitations of these early efforts became clear The utility of replay in VesselWorld was clearly demonstrated in understanding how VesselWorld mediated collaboration and in redesigning the VesselWorld appli cation Constructing the VesselWorld replay application from scratch though was not scalable The required investment for building this application was much too great Instead the approach that was chosen for building the replay application hinged around taking the existing VesselWorld system and using its constituent parts CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 9 to build the replay application The design of VesselWorld lends itself to this manip ulation thanks to its component oriented design Individual VesselWorld subsystems have very distinct points of coupling allowing them to be transferred to the new application This design however was not generalizable directly to other groupware applications This dissertation builds on the lessons learned
32. UI events include direct manipulation events in the user interface such as mouse clicks and key presses CHAPTER 2 RELATED LITERATURE 36 Task Events Task event information refers to interaction that is mediated by the groupware application Where user interface events depict the users activities at the level of point and click task events depict the users ac tivities at the level of plans and communication For replay purposes this level of event structure is important because it enables an ethnographic analysis of the user s collaborative task by allowing replay of that activity that is directly relevant to the task Online Completeness A complete transcript contains information sufficient to re create the state of the application at any given point in time A transcript can be complete with respect to user interface events or task events A transcript that is complete with respect to user interface events is not necessarily complete with regards to task events and vice versa For example a transcript can encode the sequence of keys that were tapped but in itself that information is not sufficient to reliably reconstruct whether the user s task was planning or chatting jRapture SCFP00 Playback NS83 and others RDC 03 provide complete transcripts of user interface events only jRapture replaces the underlying Java libraries with ones that transcribe external interactions with the application The Playback applicati
33. a question from Tom which requires negotiation to continue the collaboration e g a repair The use of the library does not yield any results and so Jerry then moves on to the Citeseer website Again because of the lack of feedback to Tom as to what the web browser is doing the following interchange occurs Tom are you there I can t see what you are doing Jerry we will search through citeseer for the articles since the library doesn t have anything good Tom where are you nothing is happening CHAPTER 4 OBSERVATIONAL ANALYSIS OF GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS94 Jerry we re searching through citeseer for articles that contain the words mutual and belief Once Tom s second set of questions have been asked the state of the replay is rewound to the web browser event previous to Tom s question in order to deter mine why Tom is not seeing any activity from Jerry s actions It is shown that Jerry attempted to use the library website to search for books but the web browser com ponent failed to interact with the custom JavaScript on this website Skipping to the next web browser event Jerry switches to the Citeseer website and informs Tom in the last utterance of this section Through the session a number of desired features are specifically identified For example Tom can I look at the pdf Tom any version of the paper Jerry unfortunately there is no PDF viewer built into this application We can add it in a
34. able to continue to act properly if it does not receive a timely response from a message sent to another component 3 1 2 Component Interaction As stated there is a mapping between a component identifier J and a component reference C The component repository service denoted as R is used to retrieve the component reference for a given identifier This resolution step is defined in Definition 1 The repository may be updated during run time so it is assumed that the mapping between the identifier and component is transient and should be treated as such as per the first interaction rule above Definition 1 Given the component repository R the repository acts as a map from an identifier to a component R h Ci Jo Co In Cu Component resolution is handled as follows RESOLVE R I C which is expanded to RESOLV E R I Wer CI R Lontidete Clo if Icandidate 1 return CH Where CI is the tuple In Cn as shown above CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 57 Further RESOLV E R 1 can be represented as RESOLV E 1 in the context of an application or a node as discussed below since the component repository is a singleton service A component is altered by the processing of a message Succinctly given a com ponent C and message M C M C C is a product of the set of data contained in the message the state of the component and the action contained in the message The comp
35. and input that was greatly appreciated This work would not have been completed if not for the members of the research group as well as those who I am privileged to call friends family and colleagues They listened to my endless stream of ideas frustrations and accomplishments The quality of this work is a direct testament to their help My wife who was by my side from the beginning of this journey deserves as much credit as I do I would not have gotten through this process without her This work was supported under ONR grants NO00 14 96 1 0440 and N000 14 02 1 0131 Abstract A Software Lifecycle for Building Groupware Applications Building Groupware On THYME A dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Brandeis University Waltham Massachusetts by Seth M Landsman As corporations and organizations become more distributed the use of groupware applications as part of day to day activities becomes more prevalent A successful groupware application must work as expected by the developer and the community of users In practice however assumptions made by the developer may not match the expectations of the users For groupware applications to be built that fully support the community of users an engineering methodology is required This work describes a methodology for engineering groupware applications This methodology incorporates a modified version of Boehm s spiral evolutionar
36. application the cost of developer time and the push to deploy a project grow the willingness to spend resources on building complex and customized utilities to aid in the development of an application will decrease Software testing for example is a long acknowledged need that if often underfunded and under executed MSBT04 because of the associated expense Other types of analysis applications especially ones that are not part of the classic lifecycle are no different Therefore using these tools needs to be made as cheap as possible such as by leveraging off the shelf tools such as UML editors building the construction of unit tests into the everyday development activity or generating the support tools by leveraging the existing system architecture Because of the associated cost of enabling analysis techniques in an application this work proposes techniques to do the latter This chapter discusses the needs and use of ethnographic analysis applications in the integrated lifecycle These techniques are used to collect information from the collaborative activity of the participants in a groupware session and give an over the shoulder replay of their activity It is also used to provide information into other analysis capabilities In order to make the use of these techniques cost effective they need to by provided as part of the development of the application To support these needs the SAGE framework was constructed SAGE provides t
37. be found elsewhere AFILO1 The analysis presented here used the base version of the VesselWorld application Primarily the electronic chatting that took place among the participants was ana lyzed As the analyst views the discourse he observes the most common interactions and errors in coordination Conclusions can be drawn as to what other tools and coordinating representations are needed to support the collaboration The users engaged in several types of methods of communication to organize their activity e Planning Planning activity Identifying tasks e Delimiting activity Entry and exit into phases Synchronization Turn taking e Developing conventions e Co referencing Reference to status Reference to location CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 15 Reference to identity of the object Reference to features Figure 1 3 shows the chat that was associated with part of one such analysis where activity needed to be closely coordinated At steps 1 and 2 they have already jointly lifted a task object a large waste and are planning how to move and load it on to another object the large barge If their activity is not exactly coordinated they will drop the waste and incur a penalty In lines 3 5 they submit their first of three moves At line 8 the tug suggests a convention to simplify their coordination At steps 9 and 10 they continue with the move At 15 18 they successfull
38. can accurately differentiate between different features of events A playback tool is precise with regards to time if the analyst can replay the transcript without annotation to directly display an event that occurred at a specific timestamp A playback tool is precise with regards to task event if the analyst can replay the transcript to display a task event of a certain type The playback provided by jRapture and Playback for example allow for pre cision based on the type of user interface event and the timestamp However they do not provide precision based on the task event since those do not exist within the transcript Some systems such as those found in the distributed application debugging do main have a higher level of time precision than is necessary for the ethnographic analysis toolset These systems need to maintain real time precision of replay that is the time between the collection of two events in the original application remains identical during replay The Instant Replay technique LMC87 is one example of this level of precision Aggregate information Some playback tools allow the analyst to summarize and display quantitative data of system use For example this data can include a count of window events or a count of collaboration failures Applications such as CollabLogger MS00 are specifically designed to allow for the collection of aggregate information These applications collect transcripts and ana
39. complete The analysis of the projects from the HCI class along with the student feedback highlighted several areas that THYME and its associated libraries that warranted further development and design Some of these areas are 6 4 1 Shared Web Browser An explicit request from the students was for a shared web browser A number of teams attempted to make use of a web browser within their application at one level or another The ORA team integrated the ICEBrowser ice03 successfully as a central aspect of their application though not as a component per se As discussed in Chapter 3 a shared web browser has been constructed as part of the THYME groupware component collection It has since been integrated into the ORA application among others to fulfill this need 6 4 2 Floor Control and User Roles A second concept that was evident from how THYME was used by the class was the need for user roles and floor control Two applications of note SALSA and CounterStrike both implemented a floor control and user role scheme There are a number of ways that floor control can be implemented within the framework Essentially floor control in THYME involves two parts the component that tells the user if he can interact and the component that keeps the user from interacting In practice they can be the same component the user s component refusing to send out a message if the user does not have control of the floor To do floor control securel
40. discourse provides another set of data that can be used by an analyst Lyze provides two visualization tools to show the lifetime and grouping of the transcript iotas The first tool shows the lifespan of each iota as a line The lengths of the life span of each iota can be compared allowing a visual comparison Each mention of the iota results in another point being drawn CHAPTER 4 OBSERVATIONAL ANALYSIS OF GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS112 on the iota line This tool is shown in Figure 4 7 r Time Origin p Time Scale 00e lota Type IOTA 14a set the color to green for pants plan IOTA 16a following example plan IOTA 17b draw belt functionality IOTA 17a instruction draw belt first instruct pon IOTA 2Qa IOTA 17a maybe not IOTA 22a black belt output IOTA 21a belt is black functionality 1OTA 24a move on plan IOTA 26a high y values on bottom of screen functionality IOTA 27a low y values on the top functionality C Align lotas Show Labels i eo Bort by une iz 0 Timeline RON aN Save Data Figure 4 7 Life span tool The second tool provides a scatter graph of all iotas in the transcript This graph shows the number of mentions of an iota on the X axis and the life span of the iota on the Y axis Iotas that are visually clustered together may indicate similarity between a set of iotas Both of these tools are covered in more detail in another work FA03 4 7 Conclusions This ch
41. domain action may be to construct a plan Doing so involves interface actions like pointing clicking and typing within the interface Domain actions are constructed from interface actions although there is not a clear one to one mapping between a set of interface actions and domain actions For ex ample the identical plan can result from different sets of interface actions depending on whether has to correct a typing error or not An analysis of both domain and user interface actions is relevant to the re design of the application and its interface CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 11 An ideal improvement in the system makes the collaboration within the system more effective an improvement in the domain while also reducing the amount of work the user needs to accomplish his task an improvement in the interface The replay application provides access to the transcript of an online session of system use from an observational perspective The functions provided by the replay application dictate how successfully the analyst can work with the transcript Our identified set of basic functionality includes e Replay the transcript e Stop the replay of the transcript and resume from that point e Stop the replay at certain types of actions e Vary speed at which the transcript is replayed e Rewind the transcript and resume play from a previous point e Annotate the transcript and store annotations within the transcript e Produce aggregate informati
42. entire collaboration fails The second type of architecture is Peer to Peer architecture In peer to peer data is moved between clients without the use of a centralized object There are two major variations of peer to peer where the client sends data to all inter ested clients or where the network of interconnected clients forms a distribution network In the latter case the client sends data to its nearest neighbors which then send the data to their nearest neighbors and so on until the entire net work has the data Peer to peer architectures do not benefit from a centralized coordination point like client server architectures CHAPTER 2 RELATED LITERATURE 42 Communication Method The communication method refers to what type of data is used to communicate between clients of a groupware application There are three basic types that are referenced in this section The first is Message based communication Messages are data objects that are sent between clients encoding both function and data Messages are inherently one way one client messages another client and does not expect a response While there is utility in getting a response the required handshaking makes some common tasks like broadcasting to multiple clients more costly Messages are seen in some programming languages like SmallTalk sma and Objective C PW91 and as the subject of fail safe communications research AS98 A second model is the Remote Procedure Call R
43. existing_manager public static ORAManagerCIF createManager NodeManagerCIF nm NodeManagerAB getExistingNodeManager ThId id nm getIdManager getId ora manager nm getNodeId return ORAManagerCIF nm getBlocManager getBloc id package orav2 iface import thyme core ManagerCIF This is the manager for ORA It wraps the SWBManager TubeManager and ChatManager author seth cs brandeis edu public interface ORAManagerCIF extends ManagerCIF public static final String ID Id ora source code appendix tex 161 2005 08 07 12 42 12Z seth 203 APPENDIX B SOURCE CODE TO THE ORA APPLICATION B 4 ORAv 2 specification files lt xml version 1 0 7 gt lt system spec file version 2 0 gt lt include file t4g spec t4g xml gt lt include file swabv2 spec swb client component collection xml1 gt lt include file chats spec chats client component collection xml gt lt include file tube spec tube client component collection xml gt lt version gt 2 0 lt version gt lt description gt This is the client for the Online Research Assistant Version 2 lt description gt lt init class orav2 bloc ORAClientInit gt lt parameters gt lt parameter name swab factory typed factories value rectangle typed artifact factory oval typed artifact factory line typed artifact factory gt lt parameter name tcc init class id value ora view gt lt parameter na
44. few spirals In viewing the activity in the replay tool a workaround is identified by Tom Citeseer can display images of papers which worked sufficiently for this task Another request was made to allow searching for specific features and subject matters of papers which was clearly not within the scope of this tool and identified as such during the conversation Tom is there a way we can filter for philosophy and not ai papers Jerry I do not think citeseer has that capability Jerry I don t think any paper search engine has that capability currently CHAPTER 4 OBSERVATIONAL ANALYSIS OF GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS95 Jerry how can you tell that a paper is philosophy and not AI Based on the observations of use pointing to the web page and aspects thereof was done frequently but the drawing tools which existed to aid in the referencing of objects in the web page were not used Because of how the drawing tools were implemented in that they required changing the application s mode of use from browsing to drawing their use may have been too cumbersome It may also be that in this collaboration which had only two users and relatively manageable web pages the pointing capabilities were not needed As the application is used further and more data is collected the drawing mechanism will see more use and may need to be refined 4 3 Transcription and Replay Revisited As discussed in Chapter 2 the capacity to do transcription a
45. jav Jav03a Jav03b Jav03c JBW87 Erich Gamma Richard Helm Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides Design Patterns Addison Wesley 1995 Groove networks inc desktop collaboration software http groove net Object Management Group The common object request broker Archi tecture and specification Technical report 1995 T Hickey R Alterman and J Langton Integrating tools and resources A case study in building education groupware for collaborative program ming In Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges volume 19 2004 Markus Horstmann and Mary Kirtland Dcom architecture Technical report Microsoft 1997 Edwin Hutchins How a cockpit remembers its speeds Cognitive Science 19 265 288 1995 Edwin Hutchins Cognition in the Wild MIT Press 1996 Joshua Introne and Richard Alterman Leveraging collaborative effort to infer intent Ninth Internation Conference on User Modeling 2003 ICE JAVA web browser 2003 http www icesoft com Sun s java development kit http java sun com JavaSoft Java foundation classes 2003 http java sun com products jfc JavaSoft The javabeans component architecture 2003 http java sun com products javabeans Javasoft RMI 2003 http java sun com products jdk rmi Stuart H Jones Robert H Barkan and Larry D Wittie Bugnet A real time distributed programmng environments In SRDS pages 56 65 1987 Ibm s jikes java compiler http
46. look identical to the basis application with the addition of the replay controller Further customizations are possible allowing the application to be more useful in the analysis of the activity A THYME application is natively equipped to collect a transcript of usage A transcript exists for each node in the application and consists of a set of THYME messages Because the messages are timestamped a node can be played back individ ually or a set of nodes can have their transcripts merged together and a set of nodes can be replayed as one replay session The remainder of this section discusses how THYME and SAGE enable transcription and replay implementing the requirements discussed above CHAPTER 4 OBSERVATIONAL ANALYSIS OF GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS98 4 4 1 Transcription As stated in Chapter 3 a THYME application is defined by a set of components and the connections between them Components are grouped into structures called nodes each of which has its own namespace Components communicate via a per node component called the message router A component sends an addressed message to the message router The message router will find the component the message is addressed to and deliver it THYME s message oriented architecture has several useful consequences for col lecting a transcript of use 1 All communication between components happens through messages so a THYME application needs to only collect messages in order to generat
47. of the component set This effect was accomplished by modifying the IncomingChat View and only the IncomingChat View to display their graphical calendar interface and to send canned messages when the calendar is acted upon The room acting as a broker for the messages blindly passes them on to the other hijacked views which parse the payload of the message and update their view of the calendar appropriately An example of this application in use can be seen in Figure 6 3 OGRE The Online Groupware Role Playing Enivronment is an application to allow users to participate in a Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying game This team extended the chat room so that it accepted commands from the players and the dungeon master in the format of command name arguments CHAPTER 6 USE OF THYME IN THE CLASSROOM 129 This command syntax is similar to IRC OR93 commands They also imple mented their own display of a playing board which was given commands via hijacked chat room messages 6 2 4 CounterStrike Strategy The CounterStrike Strategy application allows a clan a team of players in the CounterStrike video game to plan out a play strategy prior to starting a game This application was built using the shared whiteboard and chat room component collections both with some modifications For both collections similar to the SALSA system floor control and user classes were added This model of floor control was built into the THYME
48. of time deployed and then reconstructed to solve issues in their development i e bugs and flaws in the collaborative activity that they supported Chapter 6 showed how these groupware applications could be successfully constructed rapidly and ef fectively by relative novices Chapter 4 showed how the study of these groupware applications could be further enhanced through online ethnographic analysis This analysis technique gives an over the shoulder perspective into the collaborative user s activity as mediated by the groupware application These techniques are also sup ported by the generation of the tools that enable this type of analysis Once a collaborative application is built and deployed the application work does not end Software is notoriously hard to get right Bro95 Multi user applications such as groupware are increasingly complex and difficult to perfect especially during the initial deployment Ethnographic analysis has a number of possible impacts for the collaborative application developer A software system may have defects that result from either incorrect functionality misunderstandings in the functional requirements 138 CHAPTER 7 THE LIFECYCLE REVISITED 139 or misunderstandings as to how the application will be used in practice In the development of the CODA filesystem for example a technique called logging was used to allow the developers to capture and replay system failures which gave them insight a
49. own state mechanisms so that it can provide its own reverse functionality The wrapper approach is a general solution if the component does not have this capability already Analysis Interface Using the replay application an analyst can perform precise analysis of the usage of the basis application The SAGE Playback Controller shown in Figure 4 3 gives the analyst control over the flow of the playback of the transcript The playback controller has standard VCR like controls play rewind fast forward and stop callout 1 in the figure The controller adds two other standard movement controls step forward and step back which move one event forwards and backwards respectively The controller also allows movement through the transcript by searching for types of messages that are in the transcript s set of EVENT TY PES callout 3 The list of types is populated from the transcript at the run time of the replay application Note that the message displayed in this example is the Shared Browser message more meaningful event names will be available in a future version of the replay application The controller also provides the analyst feedback as to where he is in the ses sion The information underneath the VCR controls callout 2 shows the current timestamp of the session based on the timestamp of the last event replayed This number may be the standard Unix milliseconds since epoch or a more traditional format showing time and date N
50. palette beyond the Notes field is used to indicate the color priority of the entry The three colors red green and gray indicate the intended priority of that entry The colors and their meaning are summarized below APPENDIX D VESSELWORLD USER MANUAL 239 Red P ending entries to be done later Green C urrent entry currently being done Gray D one entries that have been completed At the far right of each entry there is a small square with the current color priority and a letter indicating that priority of that entry Clicking on this square will cycle the color of that entry allowing it to be changed on the fly as entries are completed in the course of the mission NOTE Field instantiation mode is denoted by a gray World View and a gray Object List When in this mode clicking on the World View or Object List will not make plans or allow you to edit the object instead your first click will fill in the previously selected field in the Item Palette
51. people successfully collaborate including chat rooms shared surfaces and application sharing To rapidly build a successful groupware applica tion the amount of reimplementation especially of well known functions needs to be minimized Next should a developer want to fabricate his own groupware functions the basis functions such as messaging discovery and transcript should be available and flexible enough for the developer to use Finally the framework should be flexible and simple it should not get in the way of the developer THYME has several properties that clearly aid in building groupware applications Through the use of a strict component messaging model the interdependencies and fragility between parts of an application are greatly reduced This feature has the consequence of allowing the parts of an application to be treated as separate entities This property allows parts of an application to be changed added and embedded more easily without the need for expensive coverage testing and verification of an entire application every time a change is made to an existing component The properties of the component model and reference framework were formalized in Chapter 3 Through this formalization how components interact whether or not they interact and to what degree they interact can be shown The interaction model and thereby what type of testing and dependencies there are can be programmat ically discovered Further by un
52. protected RoomClientCIF getRoomClient return RoomClientManagerAB getExistingManager getRoomClient public void actionPerformed ActionEvent evt if evt getSource equals bToggle if bToggle isSelected setSWBOn else setSWBOff APPENDIX B SOURCE CODE TO THE ORA APPLICATION protected void setSWBOn getSWBCanvasView getComponent setVisible true PaletteView getPaletteView setDrawing true bToggle setSelected true protected void setSWBOff getSWBCanvasView getComponent setVisible false PaletteView getPaletteView setDrawing false bToggle setSelected false B 3 package orav2 iface package orav2 iface import thyme core ManagerAB import thyme subsystem node iface import java util Collection import thyme id ThId this is the abstract implementation for singletons associated with a running ORAv2 application author seth cs brandeis edu public abstract class ORAManagerAB extends ManagerAB implements ORAManagerCIF public static final String ID 202 APPENDIX B SOURCE CODE TO THE ORA APPLICATION Id ora source code appendix tex 161 2005 08 07 12 42 12Z seth protected static ORAManagerCIF existing_manager public ORAManagerAB ThId id Collection args super id args public static ORAManagerCIF getExistingManager if existing_manager null existing_manager createManager return
53. rebuilding of groupware applications THYME encourages reuse of functional units called components and sets of components that serve a cohesive purpose called component collections The principles behind the component model provided by THYME effectively support this reuse The chat room is an example of a basic groupware component collection as de picted in Figure 3 1 It allows textual communication between multiple users in an open symmetric synchronous fashion The basic layout exposes two major areas the shared incoming chat view top part and outgoing bottom part chat view NOTIFICATION s has joined NOTIFICATION t has joined NOTIFICATION t has left Send User List Chooser Figure 3 1 The chat room A set of components forms the chat room component collection Figure 3 2 shows the minimal set of components that exist in the chat room and the ones required from the THYME larger groupware component collection The three custom components that form the basis of the chat room are relatively simple They communicate through a custom message associated with the component collection called the Chat Communication Message which contains the sender of the message the type of activity the message encodes and activity specific information CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 52 EE Outgoing Chat Component T lew Repository User Incoming Chat View Message Router
54. set COMPONENTS are the set of THYME components that are local to that node as defined below All components that share direct access to a message router are defined as local and are grouped inside of a node The definition of this property of locality is defined in Definition 13 All components that exist within a node s address space are local to that node Definition 13 Given component D and E D and E are defined as local with respect to each other if CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 68 COMP LOCAL D E COM P EQUIV RESOLV E MESSAGE ROUTER D RESOLV E MESSAGE ROUTER E When sending a message to a component the message router determines if the message is locally addressed that is COM P LOCAL SENDER RECEIVER true If it is local the message is delivered normally via the message router If the message is not locally addressed the message router will establish a connection to the foreign message router identified in the component identifier The foreign mes sage router is sent the message and goes through the same process determining locality between the receiving message router and the receiving component that is COM P LOCAL ROUTER RECEIVER true and delivering or re sending as appropriate An example of routing between two nodes in the chat room application can be seen in Figure 3 8 The node on the bottom of the screen containing a component that ultimately sends out a new chat message Within
55. still interact through a common second component The orthogonality relation does however provide guidance to the developer in determining what interactions are necessary to test based on the application s dependency graph CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 62 The relationship between identifiers and components allows many of the properties that have been described for components to also hold true for identifiers However due to the fact that the mapping between components and identifiers can change during the run time a property between two identifiers only holds true for a specific application and within a specific timeslice The properties of replaceability and similarity of two identifier are related to the replaceability and similarity of the components which they resolve to Replaceability of identifiers is defined in Definition 8 Similarity of identifiers is defined in Definition 9 Definition 8 Given two identifiers I and J J can replace I during the timeslice t lx y if COMP REPLACABLE RESOLVE I RESOLVE J at every instant during t x y ID REPLACEABLE I J tejzy Vri 2 lt T lt y COMP REPLACEABLE RESOLV E 1 t r RESOLV E J t 1 Definition 9 Given two identifiers I and J J are similar I during the timeslice t x y if COMP SIMILAR RESOLVE I RESOLVE J at every instant during t x y ID SIMILAR I J tezy Vri oS T lt y COMP SIMILAR RESOLV E I r RESOLV E J t 1 Identifiers ha
56. that can aid in the manipulation maintenance and tailoring of groupware applications An assembly and tailoring application would give a similar interface to the TICK appli cation providing a comprehensive layout of an application component collections and components with components connected through message paths determined by buses acceptance and production sets Also presented would be a palette of avail able components This application would allow message paths to be changed and new components to be added By using this application the component layout and CHAPTER 8 SUMMARY AND FUTURE WORK 162 interaction could be visually verified 8 1 3 Mobile Groupware THYME is a relatively light weight framework A THYME application also deals well with discovery disconnection and re connection One area of obvious expansion of the THYME framework is into handheld computing specifically mobile groupware THYME is not a replicated architecture and is well suited to heterogeneous ap plication platforms A handheld groupware application is going to have different limitations and constraints than a desktop application These limitations can be handled by having different component views backed by identical or similar models Some work on this task has been accomplished Lan03 8 2 Final Statement This work shows how applying a rigorous lifecycle to the development of groupware applications can improve their fitness to a task by u
57. the Counterstrike Strategy application shown in Chapter 6 It is considered indicative of the utility of the groupware engineering concepts discussed in Chapter 3 that the basis Counterstrike application could be modified so significantly and successfully in such a short amount of time 7 3 1 The Design of the Workforce Application The Workforce application provides a representation system for participants to take the role of managers overseeing a shift schedule Each day of the week was divided into a number of shifts Each shift needs a set number of people covering it This information is encoded in the representation system as shown in the center panel in Figure 7 5 CHAPTER 7 THE LIFECYCLE REVISITED 148 WORKFORCE SCHEDULE WORKSHEET Car SCENARIO 1 CeCe Hour Day Day2 Day3 Day4 DayS Day6 Day7 an 8 10am DA Dal 4D gc cele 10 12am Gy J G H E E elf sat Cra _ 12 2pm J cjJ c Cy HE MeN ae Cr 2 4pm ct 4 6pm 6 8pm ot 3 3 5 4 7 4 required OVAL SELECT DELETE CLEAR_ALL CREATE NOTIFICATION seth has joined bob we need a lot more people here seth I m working on it Elapsed time 0 01 59 C Quit PANIC al A Figure 7 5 The workforce application CHAPTER 7 THE LIFECYCLE REVISITED 000 gt E na A a A 0 i gt gt
58. the desired behavior and progress to the goal of a released application In this model an application framework is developed and new features are gradually added and refined After a certain milestone possibly based on the number of features or time elapsed a prototype is generated and used to measure the status of the project In some models such as the spiral model Boe88 see Figure 7 3 the prototype undergoes a risk analysis phase which subsumes the testing phase and CHAPTER 7 THE LIFECYCLE REVISITED 143 Requirements Towards Completed System Risk Analysis Implementation Deployment Figure 7 3 The spiral software model also determines whether the project is progressing acceptably At some point the customer and the developer agree to bless a milestone into a shippable product The evolutionary model is designed to handle change as part of the normal lifecycle The requirements for a milestone are decided at the start of a milestone and may consist of fixing replacing or removing previous features Software methodologies are moving to embrace change by understanding that the software system is neither a static entity nor is the static process The traditional waterfall model is very costly when the requirements or design change late in the cycle The incremental models realize that changes occur in the cycle and try to mitigate any losses The evolutionary models accept that the prototype will be changed perhaps dr
59. the discrete points in the timeline of the session and is used to explicitly order messages as they get injected into the playback application Within the THYME application transcripts can be accessed during the run time of the application through a service component called the transcript emitter This service provides access to previously transcribed messages in the current session of use A transcript is ended when the session of use is over and archived so that it includes session summary information called meta information as well as the transcript Archived sessions of use can be loaded into the transcript emitter explicitly A SAGE application makes use of the transcript emitter to playback archived sessions In a THYME application all changes to the application state occur through the reception and processing of messages A complete transcript is therefore the collec tion of all messages that are sent between components A transcript is represented CHAPTER 4 OBSERVATIONAL ANALYSIS OF GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS100 as TRANSCRIPT re jx yj and represents the transcript for all messages between Mx and My inclusive TRANSCRIPT X is used for referring to the message Myx that is stored in the transcript Given that a transcript is a collection of messages that is sent throughout the application a transcript can be shown to be complete if it captures all interaction throughout the application The set of messages captured in a transcript durin
60. the node the message is routed from the outgoing chat view to the chat communication model The chat communication model addresses the message to the remote chat communication model The local message router realizes that this target is on a remote node and sends the message to the foreign message router Once the foreign message router realizes that the message is targeted to a component local to it the message is routed locally as shown in the example above 3 2 Groupware Components The THYME framework provides two sets of groupware capabilities shared group ware widgets and groupware component collections Groupware widgets are shared CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS a User Outgoing Chat View Incoming Chat View Chat Communication Message Chat Communication Model Component Repository Component Identifier Lookup Message Router node Incoming Chat Communication Message Chat Communication Model Chat Communication Message Router Message Outgoing Chat View Component Identifier Lookup Component Repository Incoming Chat View node Figure 3 8 A non local routing example in the chat room 69 CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 70 versions of common user interface components such as lists and tables Group ware component collect
61. the similar Observer pattern and an extension of this pattern that adds an authoritative store role S MVC THYME defines four role interfaces Store Model View and Controller that are implemented by components that participate in this pattern These roles explicitly define the pattern and designate how each component is used in this pattern In the replay application for example models and views are extracted from the basis application and used by the application for accepting data from the transcript and displaying the interaction respectively 4 5 2 Assembly of the SAGE Application Assembly of a SAGE application occurs via a transformation of a THYME appli cation The transformation operates on an application A and will produce a new application Agage From the application Ap two sets of components can be extracted the models M and the views Vp which correspond to those components in the application that identify themselves as models and views respectively This transfor mation occurs in three steps CHAPTER 4 OBSERVATIONAL ANALYSIS OF GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS110 In the first step each model in M is transformed into a model that can process the SAGE replay messages In the common case models can be wrapped by SAGE model wrappers The most common type of wrapper assumes that the model can be manipulated completely by messages and can be cloned If these two requirements hold true the model can be used for replay in bot
62. they attempt to ensure that the developers do not miss an important step either through a mistake or because CHAPTER 7 THE LIFECYCLE REVISITED 140 they do not budget for that step in terms of developer time or time to market It also provides situational awareness of what other developers are working on If one developer knows that the project is in the design phase it is reasonable to assume that all other developers are working towards the design of the application Every lifecycle has four common stages requirements design implementation and testing In the requirements stage the customer needs are gathered discussed and formalized These requirements are the metric on which the correctness of the completed system is judged During design the requirements are refined into an arti fact that can be implemented into a software system The design artifact decomposes the system into individual modules and provides the roadmap for how these modules work and interact with other modules During implementation the design artifact is developed into a software system The final stage testing verifies the correctness of the code was the system built correctly and validates that the code implements the agreed upon requirements was the correct system built There are three prevalent classes of software lifecycles traditional incremental and evolutionary The traditional model such as the waterfall method Whi91 shown in Figure 7
63. to require as minimal an investment as possible After deployment occurs and a tran script is collected the construction and use of a replay application needs to occur Finally refinement of the application needs to be possible and such refinement needs to be done without requiring extensive reworking of the entire application The techniques and reference implementation described in the remainder of this dissertation show that an integrated set of tools can address this problem The THYME toolkit described in the next chapter shows how rapid building and refinement of a groupware application can be achieved through the use of a layered set of software libraries Included in these libraries is a complete mechanism for transcription of activity Refinement is aided by limiting and formally describing how different aspects of the groupware system interact A developer can become reasonably sure that his changes are limited in scope and effect allowing refinement to occur without affecting other parts of the application The SAGE toolkit described in Chapter 4 shows how semi automatic construc tion of transcript replay tools can be achieved through code generation and tagging techniques Replay tools will only be constructed when the construction is very cheap Generic tools however do not provide the necessary fidelity to accurately observe the activity of the collaborators Chapter 3 Building Groupware Applications As discussed in t
64. to other parts of the THYME infrastructure This service im plements the interface thyme subsystem node iface NodeManagerCIF IdManager The IdManager handles the retrieval creation and manipulation of THYME Ids ThlIds To get a Thld the developer passes information into the IdManager The IdManager then returns an authoritative ThId If this ThId does not exist it will be created There is only one ThId object for any given combination of class id instance id and node id The two most common pieces of information to pass into APPENDIX A THE TINY THYMER 175 the IdManager is a class identifier and instance identifier pair or a THYME URL ThURL This service implements thyme service IdManagerCIF BlocManager The BlocManager handles the retrieval and creation of local components To get a component the developer passes a ThId into the BlocManager The BlocManager then returns a component A given ThId will point to one and only one component If the component does not already exist it will be created This service implements thyme service BlocManagerCIF FindManager The FindManager handles the discovery of components based on partially specified information This will be covered in more detail in a future tutorial This service implements thyme subsystem find iface FindManagerCIF Parameter Manager The ParameterManager provides a node wide database of application parameters Parameters that are specified on the c
65. tributed application debugging CBM90 In this domain replay is used to re create the circumstances under which a defect occurred in a distributed system By observ ing the exact conditions surrounding the defect in the system the developer can draw conclusions regarding why the defect occurred with more fidelity Without replay ca pabilities the developer often has to guess as to what the system state was when the defect occurred often resulting in incorrect deductions 2 2 1 Transcription A transcript is the record of the user s activity as mediated by the collaborative system The way a transcript is collected can have direct influence on the quality and quantity of replay techniques available to analyze the system Our set of identified properties include Collection of Online and Off line Activity Transcripts may encode online be havior which is the activity that is directly mediated by the software system They may also encode off line behavior which may be part of the collaboration but not directly mediated by the software Eye tracking for example is usu ally a collection of off line behavior where mouse actions are online behaviors While off line behavior can add value to observation the quality of the online behavior collection is most important for our analysis techniques Type of Online Information Encoded There are two types of online informa tion that a transcript can encode User Interface events UI
66. users within your user community By integrating developer led observations into the application development pro cess the question of incorporating feedback can be answered within the realm of determining how the application is used in practice Precise information can be gath ered from these techniques incorporated into the development cycle and verified effectively The integration also means that the crucial analysis steps are less likely to be lost as time and resources grow short CHAPTER 7 THE LIFECYCLE REVISITED Requirements Risk Analysis Towards Completed System Usage Analysis Implementation Deployment Figure 7 4 The integrated software lifecycle 145 This lifecycle is based on the spiral model and is an evolutionary model of de velopment and is shown in Figure 7 4 It contains additional steps that include explicit use of analysis that fit directly into the risk analysis and requirements stages of development Its ordered phases are 1 requirements 2 design 3 implementation 4 deployment 5 usage analysis 6 risk analysis In this lifecycle analysis plays a key part in the development of the collaborative application This lifecycle is made possible by having technology in place during CHAPTER 7 THE LIFECYCLE REVISITED 146 the development phases of the application to collect transcripts of usage and to build a tool that replays these transcripts In risk analysis co
67. working product until he is certain that information is ready to be shared When there is a large amount of information sharing information that is not directly necessary for the task at hand may lead to cognitive overload Relaxed WYSIWIS requires design and decisions as to what data needs to be shared what does not and where those assumptions change but may be more effective in a complex collaboration One example of this model is found in the system DistView PS94 which lets users explicitly share and unshare pieces of information 2 1 1 Communication There are a number of canonical collaboration tools that can be classified by these three vectors These tools attempt to provide standard communication channels between participants as they collaborate over the task itself They may or may not provide the representation of the task depending on the type of task but provide ways to support the task through aiding communication between participants Some collaborative tools attempt to recreate the feel of collocated communication in a geographically distributed environment A voice channel such as a phone or voice over ip connection gives participants the ability to talk to one another and preserves the benefits of speech such as voice inflection Another option is using a video channel to communicate between participants such as in a teamroom or video teleconference VTC This option tries to replicate more of the face to face interact
68. xterm Terminal app etc and navigate to your my project base directory 2 Start the THYME chat room run the command APPENDIX A THE TINY THYMER 184 sh bin run chat room sh node id room This will start a Node and launch the chat room initializer You will see some thing similar to System is started via tcc bloc DefaultRoomInit 532750 Node URL is thyme room 129 64 46 98 11000 node room Hostname is grey IP address is 129 64 46 98 Make a note of the IP address 3 Start a client via the command sh bin run chat client sh url thyme room lt ip address gt login seth Replace lt ip address gt with the ip address from the previous step This entire structure is called a ThURL which is used to point to a specific THYME component in this case we are pointing to a chat room This step will launch a chat room client that will point to the chat room Try typing a little bit and make sure that it is sent to the chat room itself 4 Now start another chat room via the same command in another terminal with a different login name Once this comes up a notification should be received in the first client that another client connected Type back and forth to ensure that this works A 3 2 Building a Chat Room This section will go through the building of a THYME chat room The final code for this section can be found in the chats module APPENDIX A THE TINY THYMER 185 Node Chat Client Chat
69. 1 of development is strictly sequential The traditional model is not designed to handle any significant change once a previous stage has been completed Since each stage is designed to be executed once the artifacts from that previous stage continue intact to the next stage For example a change to the requirements during implementation may result in the loss of significant work This increasing cost of refinement is famously discussed in the Mythical Man Month Bro95 A second lifecycle model called incremental development mitigates the costs of late cycle changes by constructing incremental partial products Each product is constructed as part of an abbreviated but complete cycle of the waterfall model see CHAPTER 7 THE LIFECYCLE REVISITED 141 Requirements Implementation Figure 7 1 The waterfall software model CHAPTER 7 THE LIFECYCLE REVISITED 142 eer BSB Om Kh Ose n Time Figure 7 2 The incremental software model Figure 7 2 and results in a single feature set being completely designed implemented and tested at the end of each increment The cost of change is greatly reduced if the change is made to the feature set being implemented during a given increment In this case an increment can be started over and only the work done on the increment is lost Changes made to previous increments may result in more lost work The last model evolutionary development uses successive functional prototypes to model
70. 2 bloc package orav2 bloc import thyme id ThId 193 APPENDIX B SOURCE CODE TO THE ORA APPLICATION 194 import java util Collection import tube iface import chats iface import swabv2 iface import thyme core ManagerAB import orav2 iface ORAManagerAB This is the default implementation of the ORAManager author seth cs brandeis edu public class DefaultORAManager extends ORAManagerAB public static final String ID Id ora source code appendix tex 161 2005 08 07 12 42 12Z seth public DefaultORAManager ThId id Collection args super id args public TubeManagerCIF getTubeManager return TubeManagerAB getExistingManager public ChatManagerCIF getChatManager return ChatManagerAB getExistingManager public SWBManagerCIF getSWBManager return SWBManagerAB getExistingManager package orav2 bloc APPENDIX B SOURCE CODE TO THE ORA APPLICATION 195 import t4g iface RoomClientInitAB import t4g iface RoomClientCIF import java util Collection import java util List import java util Iterator import thyme id ThId import thyme role ModelRIF import tube iface TubeManagerAB import tube iface TubeManagerCIF import tcc role VisibleViewRIF import swabv2 iface ArtifactFactoryCIF import swabv2 iface TypedArtifactFactoryCIF import swabv2 iface SWBManagerAB import swabv2 iface SWBManagerCIF import chats iface ChatManagerAB import
71. A Software Lifecycle for Building Groupware Applications Building Groupware On THYME A Dissertation Presented to The Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Brandeis University Computer Science Richard Alterman Advisor In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy by Seth M Landsman February 2006 This dissertation directed and approved by Seth M Landsman s committee has been accepted and approved by the Graduate Faculty of Brandeis University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Adam B Jaffe Dean of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Committee Richard Alterman Chair Timothy Hickey Mitch Cherniack John Patterson Copyright by Seth M Landsman 2006 This work is dedicated to Gale Wilcow Rita Treiber Jennie Landsman Abraham Landsman and others who could not be here today Acknowledgments The author wishes to thank the students and teaching assistants who participated in the Human Computer Interaction class COSI 125a which contributed to the results discussed in 6 The author also wishes to thank Alexander Feinman Heather Quinn David Wit tenberg Richard Alterman and the members of my committee for their comments on previous versions of this work My advisor Richard Alterman provided invaluable guidance and help throughout this process Additionally the members of my committee provided advice
72. By using ethnographic analysis the developer can learn how people use the application to perform the prescribed task By using these kinds of techniques the researcher can develop user models of interaction Hut95 Hut96 SSJ74 develop theories of breakdowns of the collaboration Gar67 Eas96 and hypothesize how collaboration should be changed to better support the activity AFILO1 There are existing methods for collecting data of usage and performing an analysis of activity including videotaping user activity ST91 or capturing raw events and replaying them SCFP00 Our approach involves building analysis capabilities into the collaborative application itself by allowing replay of the system s use to occur at an integrated level within the semantics of the application CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 6 Developers need to collect sufficient information to determine how the applica tion was used where it may have broken down conceptually or where it may have failed technically Because analysis is a fundamental part of the application this information can be collected from the field The replay of the application s use can drive the design redesign and development tasks in a precise manner combining the developer s technical understanding of the application the user s context in using the application and the interactive information describing what the user was doing during the breakdown Integrated ethnographic analysis has a
73. CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 7 such as GOMS JK96 may aid an analyst in determining which user interface ac tivities carried the largest cognitive cost but cannot help in determining if that cost was related to the activity context or conditions of the group collaborative activ ity External replay does not help to understand the consequences of user activity therefore even though it is possible to observe individual user actions this strategy does not provide enough information Only ethnographic analysis that is collected from within the application provides the context provides the capacity to examine individual actions and activity and shows the consequences of the group activity Not all internal replay collection techniques provide sufficient information to com pletely understand the user activity in context Non invasive techniques such as jRapture SCF POO collect raw events within a running Java application This tech nique requires changing the underlying Java libraries but it requires no changes to the application Replay is accomplished by re injecting those raw events into the application via the changed Java libraries and provides the ability to do ethnographic analysis but only at the level of raw activity Determining the user s intent behind the executing activity is not possible since every button press and every mouse click look the same This technique also does not provide any access to group activity only to individu
74. CHAPTER 5 DISTRIBUTING COMPUTING APPLICATIONS 120 ee ami p ee ee ee ee a ee ee ae eee Figure 5 1 The node neighborhood for A CHAPTER 5 DISTRIBUTING COMPUTING APPLICATIONS 121 5 3 Transcription Support Transcription needs to exist at all levels of the infrastructure to be effective One major area of transcription that is not covered by the message passing architecture is the collection of information from non component sources such as user interface widgets A service called the widget factory provides infrastructure for building user in terface objects in a THYME application that produce transcripts of their use These objects are constructed through the factory GHJV95 pattern All objects created by this service are instrumented so that their actions create a Widget TranscriptMessage This message is informational only and is placed in the transcript of use A second consequence of the widget factory allows user interface widgets to be transparently replaced by shared implementations of the same widget type Shared widgets will in many cases have the same behavior as the unshared version from the perspective of the local user New shared versions can be added to the widget factory as they become available without adding any additional code in the application itself If both a shared and unshared version of a widget exist which type of widget is returned by the widget factory can be chosen at run time 5 4 Conclusion The
75. Chat Communication Model Chat Room Components Figure 3 2 Chat room components such as a chat utterance The message passing properties of the components allow reasoning about their interaction If a THYME component has a limited set of messages it reacts to then its interaction with other components can be clearly shown As discussed later in this chapter embedding the chat room component collection in an application is simple straightforward and reliable The THYME framework itself is made up of multiple layers of components as shown in Figure 3 3 A groupware application consists of THYME widgets THYME groupware components and application specific groupware features The core of the THYME framework consists of the underlying distributed component model and the THYME groupware components An additional library the THYME Component Collection provides a library of distributing computing specific capabilities and is presented in a later chapter The remainder of this chapter details the underlying model and features of a group ware framework and its implementation in THYME The next section discusses the concepts behind the distributed component model including how THYME compo nents interact how they are created and how they are accessed The section following shows the groupware component library which includes both widgets and components CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 53 The Groupwar
76. D USER MANUAL 221 Figure D 3 Cranes equipment and joined operation Cranes There are two types of cranes as pictured in Figure D 3 The top picture shows the cranes in their normal state The main purpose of each crane is to lift and move waste When carrying waste the cranes will look like the second row of pictures Some waste requires equipment to be deployed in order to be handled safely For this purpose one crane is equipped with a dredge D and the other is equipped with a net N This equipment must be deployed before waste can be lifted When equipment is deployed the cranes will appear differently as shown in the third row Certain waste requires the cranes to work in synchronization to move To do this the cranes must join together before moving the waste When the cranes are joined they will look like two interlocked circles as in the last picture Tugs The main purpose of the tug is to aid the cranes in removing waste by transporting smaller barges around the harbor Figure D 4 illustrates how the tug appears by itself and when it is attached to a small barge The tug can also perform several specialized operations in order to assist the cranes with waste removal It is the only ship that can identify the special equipment required to lift a particular barrel of waste If leaking waste is discovered the tug APPENDIX D VESSELWORLD USER MANUAL 222 Figure D 4 The tug Figure D 5 A barrel of toxic waste
77. DO_READY transition if the component is in the initialized stage If the component is in the constructed stage it will first execute setInit setReset This method will execute the LIFECYCLE_DO_RESET transition setShutdown This method will execute the LIFECYCLE_DOSHUTDOWN tran sition APPENDIX A THE TINY THYMER 179 Finally THYME provides a set of introspection methods which determine if the component is current in the specified stage These methods are e isConstructed e isInit e isReady e isShutdown A 3 Your Application A 3 1 Setting Up Your Environment To setup your environment you need to download the package source code you will be using and to properly configure your environment to compile and run your application and the THYME services Computer and Network Building and running the THYME application requires the following features in your computing environment MacOSX mac or Linux lin operating system We have only tested THYME under Linux and MacOSX There are a considerable number of these machines available on campus and in the COSI Berry Patch Note we have not tested THYME on nor do we support THYME on any version of Windows win We will not give any time extensions if you fail to complete your project because of Windows incompatibilities APPENDIX A THE TINY THYMER 180 RAM Each THYME node runs in its own virtual machine and therefore you should have enough memory to supp
78. GModel are placed within the State Of Data subsystem and act as models for component data The CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 19 GComponent components are placed within the State Of Interface subsystem and display data from a corresponding set of GModel components GComponents also act as their own controllers GComponents update themselves upon receipt of a property change event from the GModel Changes in the system propagate to the GModels This highly coupled communication between GModels and GComponent violates the separation imposed by the subsystem hierarchy as models and compo nents may have information about features and capabilities of each other beyond what the subsystem layout exposes The corresponding layout of the GComponents and GModels can be seen in Figure 1 6 The VW SAGE application is constructed from GComponents or modified GCom ponents and modified GModels The GComponents are optionally modified to better present replayed data such as combining different users views GModels are mod ified to allow the processing and incorporation of transcript data as it is injected into the replay application Additional replay and transcript specific subsystems are added to complete the replay system 1 2 4 Issues with VesselWorld and VW SAGE The VesselWorld application managed to collect complete replayable transcripts However building the replay tool for the VesselWorld system was still expensive GModels and GComponents whe
79. HCI class we also conclude that the THYME component model is flexible and adaptable to different types of synchronous groupware projects As part of the analysis of the use of the THYME framework we also developed a taxonomy describing the approaches the students took in using the framework The four approaches we encountered were extending the existing components altering the existing components constructing new components and hijacking components to retool them for a new purpose We also measured the amount of work students put into the development of their applications by calculating a difference between their application and the base THYME package they were given This measure divided the teams into two factions teams who primarily added new components and extended existing ones and teams who modified the existing code provided Based on our measure we can conclude that neither faction expended significantly more work than the other Introducing a new framework and component model to Computer Science students is hard Component oriented programming is not usually taught at the undergraduate level and many of the techniques that make it an effective model of development take time and effort to perfect However by observing how a simple component model such as THYME is used over the course of the semester we can hope to gain some CHAPTER 6 USE OF THYME IN THE CLASSROOM 136 insight as to how to make the transition easier and more
80. NE DATA SCROLL PANE ACTION Where SCROLL PANE ACTION is chosen from the set SET V ALUE CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 73 Co present Scroll Pane The co present scroll pane is a relaxed WYSIWIS form of the shared scroll pane Instead of having scroll pane position be replicated in each UI object the user is informed of the position of other user s scroll panes through marks that are placed on the scrollbar When a change is made to the co present scroll pane widget a SharedScrollPaneActionMessage is sent out The acceptance CoPresentScroll Pane 4cc and production CoPresentScrollPaneprop sets are the same as the shared scroll pane sets By the definition of compatibility Definition 4 stated earlier in this chapter the co present scroll pane is compatible with the shared scroll pane Both types of scroll panes can be used together having some scroll panes that are shared and others that are co present Shared Button The shared button widget is an action oriented widget replacing javax swing JButton Activating the button causes an action message to be sent to other shared but tons in the same group When the action message is received it will cause the actionPerformed method of the button s ActionListener to be triggered prompt ing an action as if the button itself were pressed locally The shared button sends and receives a SharedButtonActionMessage This mes sage is defined in Definition 18 Definit
81. PC model The RPC model has a two way connection between the objects that are communicating and mimics a method invocation on the remote object Similar to a single machine programming language construct a method is invoked and a return value is received The current application thread usually blocks until the response is received RPC methods are inherently fragile If the remote object has been changed has disconnected or refuses to respond error conditions result that may affect the calling client all of which increase the software system s com plexity Generally Peter Deutsch s Fight Fallacies of Distributed Computing Deu argues against an RPC model RPC models however are simpler to use as they more act like a single machine system RPC methods are supported in the Java Programming Language Jav03c CORBA Gro95 and Microsoft s DCOM HK97 The last model is the Replicated Object model This model is based around a set of objects on all clients are identical copies of one another When applied to CHAPTER 2 RELATED LITERATURE 43 Toolkit Type Communication WYSIWIS DISCIPLE Client Server Replicated objects strict only Dist View Client Server Replicated objects strict with private windows FlexiBeans Client Server Messages unenforced GroupKit Client Server RPC unenforced Wren Peer to Peer Messages unenforced Groove Peer to Peer Messages strict with relaxed view configuration Table 2 3 Gro
82. PPLICATIONS101 on A is done by applying the elements of the transcript on each component in the application This is done as follows REPLAY A T 0 S Vi 0 lt i lt S A Aj_1 TRANSCRIPT i Where the statement A A 1 TRANSCRIPT i is expanded to Aj 1 TRANSCRIPT i Vo C Aj_1 C C TRANSCRIPT i Replay to a specific message X is done by applying all positionally previous events from the transcript up to and including Mx to the application SAGE provides event level precision Time level precision within a collected tran script is limited to the instants of time that are collected in the transcript While each message has an associated timestamp that refers to when it was collected the granularity is limited to the points in time when the messages were actually collected For example if the time between an event i 1 and 7 is 10 minutes there is no way to display any activity between those two events However if the transcript is complete it is possible to go to a specific point in time by progressing to the messages the last message that occurred before the requested timestamp If in the example given the transcript is complete it can be deduced that no system activity occurred in the intervening 10 minutes so there is no real precision lost Supporting event level precision occurs by being able to search for specific types of events Given a transcript the set of possible event types is represented by the set E
83. PTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 80 Chat Room The chat room application included with THYME as discussed above presents an interface similar to instant messenger Ame03 or IRC OR93 which allows users of the application to communicate textually The chat is completely unstructured and open with no floor control or other restrictions on activity In addition to the chat room described above THYME includes a chat room that is based around the room component When a new chat utterance is formulated a message is constructed that is sent to the room associated with the chat client The room relays the message and the communication is displayed in the incoming com munication panel Like instant messaging communication is only sent when the user explicitly sends it the incoming communication panel is not updated continuously Each chat room client component collection is now defined by the components INCOMING CH AT V IEW OUTGOING CH AT VIEW CH AT MODEL ROOM CLIENT Communication from the OUTGOING CHAT VIEW are sent to the room by the ROOM CLIENT Incoming communication is received by the ROOM CLIENT and sent to the CHAT MODEL The INCOMING CHAT VIEW is updated from the CHAT MODEL The chat room uses the ChatCommunicationMessage formally defined in Defini tion 24 Definition 24 ChatCommunicationMessage MESSAGE CLIENT DATA CHAT COM MUNICATION ACTION Where CH AT COMMUNICATION ACTION is chosen from the set COMMU
84. Q gt gt E WORKSHEET Al timestamp 1079018481977 position 31 1780 Bob Last Event swabv2 carb SWBArtifactActionCarb CeCe Event type swabv2 carb SWBArtifactActionCarb he DayS Day6 Day7 Dan e Ed Fay 10 12am Gail 12 2pm Hal 2 4pm lan Jen 4 6pm 6 8pm Employees sA 3 3 5 4 6 7 required OVAL SELECT DELETE CLEAR_ALL hau Day 6 2 8 hau Day 7 12 4 hau CeCE is next hiep yo jus start tossin the names in the schedule Send Elapsed time 0 06 45 hau hiep bao Quit PANIC 1079016995284 PANIC at 1079016995284 Figure 7 6 The SAGE replay application for the workforce application PANIC at 1079016995284 149 The available workers are represented by a palette of items on the right side of the screen Common drawing tools are below the timesheet canvas A chat room is placed on the bottom of the screen Additionally an attention button was added The attention button provides a pop up window on every participant s screen except the participant that triggered the attention button This button was added to solve the case where one participant needs to collaborate with one or more other participants but they are not currently paying attention to the the communication channel The implementation of the application leveraged the existing Counterstrike appli cation which is shown in Figure 7 7 As stated in Chapter 6 it consisted of the chat room and shared whiteboa
85. Room A Chat Client Node Node Figure A 3 The component layout of the chat room The chat room consists of two major components the room and the client Each chat session where multiple people are chatting with each other revolves around a single chat room and one client for each individual user See Figure A 3 This layout directly corresponds to how the components will be laid out There are two components in the THYME chat room the ChatRoom and the ChatClient View a Room and the client s View into the room The ChatRoom The ChatRoom component has two responsibilities 1 Keeping track of registered clients accepting newly registered clients and al lowing clients to unregister 2 Distributing communication utterances from a clients to other clients Registration messages are sent from a client to the room informing the room of a newly connected client When a new client registers with a room the room will send APPENDIX A THE TINY THYMER 186 public class ChatRoom extends RoomAB Figure A 4 Class declaration for the chat room public void receive CarbIF carb ThId source if carb instanceof ChatsCommunicationCarb do stuff with this message F Figure A 5 Basic chat room receive method out a registration message informing other clients of the newly registered participant These messages are encapsulated by the
86. RoomClientManagerAB getExistingManager getRoomClient JLayeredPane lp new JLayeredPane lp setLayout new FullsizeLayoutManager JPanel browser getSwingWidgetFactory createPanel browser setLayout new BorderLayout ViewRIF toolbar_view getToolbarView toolbar_view asBloc ensureReady rce registerThId toolbar_view asBloc getThId browser add toolbar_view getComponent BorderLayout SOUTH ViewRIF browser_view getBrowserView browser_view asBloc ensureReady rce registerThId browser_view asBloc getThId browser_view getComponent setVisible true browser_view getComponent setPreferredSize new Dimension 500 500 lp setLayer browser_view getComponent 10 APPENDIX B SOURCE CODE TO THE ORA APPLICATION 200 lp add browser_view getComponent ViewRIF canvas_view getSWBCanvasView canvas_view asBloc ensureReady rc registerThId canvas_view asBloc getThId lp setLayer canvas_view getComponent 20 lp add canvas_view getComponent JScrollPane jsp getSwingWidgetFactory createSynchronizedScrollPane lp browser add jsp BorderLayout CENTER return browser protected JComponent make_right_panel RoomClientCIF rc getRoomClient JPanel chat_panel getSwingWidgetFactory createPanel chat_panel setLayout new BorderLayout ViewRIF incoming_view getIncomingChatView incomi
87. The Tutorial 22 i204 4 2454 24524 2o cas C 4 Overview of a Widget as te ca best as Ad eck eke Sy ae BOG C 5 Implementing a Widgets a 6 4 2 04 GS both OR oe RS eee PS C0 Specimen tion Files s sis a Yaa els ate a ee a hve ne ot dee Cor Gonelisions s 2 3 5 2 4 wale te ho a he eS eh BSS ek BES D VesselWorld User Manual P t Starting Ups a ee ath a eee OE 20 ee ere ae ee ee oe me Ree D 2 Information and Manipulation of VesselWorld D 3 Planning and the Planning Window D 4 Coordinating with other Captains sos eden 4 ao See ae ee List of Figures 1 1 1 2 1 3 1 4 1 5 1 6 1 7 1 8 2 1 2 2 2 3 2 4 2 5 3 1 3 2 3 3 3 4 3 9 3 6 3 7 3 8 3 9 3 10 3 11 3 12 3 13 3 14 4 1 4 2 4 3 A congressional GAO study aoaaa 000000025 ae 3 The VW SAGE system 518 oe ob a eee de ee he Boe he ER 13 An example of VesselWorld dialogue 16 The subsystem interaction lt fo2c6 y a A gmigs Gee gee GAS 17 The subsystem model a2 Aes ote eae a Be ek ek 18 GComponent and GModel interaction oa aa a 20 The shared web browser component layout 23 The shared web browser transcription mechanism 24 Temporality and locality matrix o oo b ks oe Bowe eB es 30 The WYSIWIS spectrum 2 55 4 a fhe 4 eg eS en Gok de aoe amp 31 The DISCIPLE framework ins odes atl a Sade eet ae be ed Be 44 The GroupKit framework 4 4 4 4415 44 4 ls ae Beeld Bao AS
88. The first step is to implement the ActionType class for the JTree This class is used by messages to specify what type of action should be taken based on the message s payload Name this new class SharedTreeActionType and place it in the message subdi rectory Its package should be widgettest message This class provides constant type enumerated variable values for use in the message The actions that this class defines are add delete and change nodes Optionally the shared JTree may also define methods to lock and unlock a node A partial implementation of this class is shown in Figure C 3 C 5 2 The Message The second step is to create the message for the JTree This class is passed between shared JTree models The message contains an action type and a payload All APPENDIX C THE THYME WIDGET TUTORIAL 211 package widgettest message import thyme message ActionMessageAB import t4g share WidgetIdentifier public class SharedTreeActionMessage extends ActionMessageAB protected WidgetIdentifier wid protected String node_value public SharedTreeActionMessage SharedTreeActionType action WidgetIdentifier _wid String _node_value super action wid _wid node_value _node_value public WidgetIdentifier getWidgetIdentifier return wid public String getNodeValue return node_value Figure C 4 Partial implementation of SharedTreeActionMessage interaction between widgets is handled through message
89. UI object The tree data represented by a CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 75 set of nodes and the relation information between them is replicated in each of the widgets in the group s tree model The expansion of the tree however is completely private and not replicated The tree model which is an implementation of javax swing tree TreeModel provides an API for manipulating the data of the tree in addition to the standard tree model features This extended API covers the insertion deletion and alteration of nodes It also provides the means to change the tree structure changing the rela tion information of nodes The model contains an internal node locking mechanism ensuring that a user s set of operations are not overwritten by another user This widget defines the ShareTreeActionMessage and is shown in Figure 20 Upon receiving the message the tree s content is updated Definition 20 The SharedTreeActionMessage is defined as SharedT ree ActionMessage WIDGET IDENTIFIER WIDGET GROUP SHARED TREE ACTION TREE NODE Where SHARED T REE ACTION is chosen from the set ADD NODE REMOVE NODE REPLACE NODE The shared tree has a production SharedTreeproa set of SharedTableprop WidgetGrouping Request Message WidgetGrouping ResponseMessage SharedT ree ActionM essage The acceptance set SharedTre gcc is the same Shared Table The shared table is a widget very similar to the shared tre
90. VENT TY PES T where T is a transcript The available set of EVENT TY PES is related to the level of domain information in the transcript If the tran script only contains UI events at the level of keyboard and mouse actions then that level of granularity is available to the analyst through the replay tool However if the transcript contains events that illustrate interaction with the representation sys tem such as Chat Messages then the replay tool can use those events to show event CHAPTER 4 OBSERVATIONAL ANALYSIS OF GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS102 boundaries This information would allow the analyst to say skip to the next chat utterance for example Milestoning The approach of encoding transitions between states is done for two major reasons First encoding the entire state at each change will take up a large amount of disk and processing resources and second will require a level of introspection and access to all aspects of the application that may not be easily available Instead encoding transitions is accomplished through the use of the existing message passing infras tructure without needing information about the components their state and how their state can be captured In encoding transitions the ideal situation would have each transition be re versible That is Cra Cr i 1 M and Cr i 1 Cr M However messages in our framework as is true in the majority of message passing frameworks are not de si
91. Y THYMER 181 default with MacOSX and most versions of Linux You must have these three programs properly installed in order to compile THY ME source code and run your applications Environment Properly setting up your environment is critical to properly building and deploying a THYME application The following environment variables must be set or otherwise passed into the build system JAVA_HOME The location of the Java JDK JAVA The java executable ANT_HOME The location of the Ant package ANT The location of the Ant executable JAVAC The location of your java compiler preferably jikes To set an environment variable under the tcsh shell use setenv lt VARIABLE gt lt VALUE gt For example to set JAVA HOME to usr java use setenv JAVA_HOME usr java APPENDIX A THE TINY THYMER 182 Obtaining the Source Code The source code that you will be using to build your application is located in our CVS tree as the my project module First you must tell CVS that you are authorized to obtain this source code Do this by logging in to CVS as an anonymous user via cvs d pserver anonymous group cs brandeis edu cvsroot login and hit Enter when it prompts you for a password Then checkout the actual source code via cvs d pserver anonymous group cs brandeis edu cvsroot co my project base This command will provide you with a directory called my project base In this directory will you find the following subdirect
92. al activity The investigation into online ethnographic analysis points to the need for inte grated meaningful groupware application replay To record an action the analysis application must encode the raw events i e mouse click as well as determine the meaning of each raw event within the context of the application i e selecting the object waste To get this level of integration and information though is expensive While building such tools is useful for all the reasons described here extensive im plementation work is required to do so The solution to making it possible for these tools to be used is reducing the amount of work required to create them CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 8 This thesis will explore a successful approach employed to decrease the cost of building these tools by integrating the capabilities into the technology used to con struct an application The toolkits THYME and SAGE are presented as a proof of concept of how these capabilities can be achieved 1 2 A Case Study To study same time computer mediated collaboration the VesselWorld ALFI98 LAFIO1 experimental groupware platform was constructed There are three ma jor research activities that were based on the platform The work that this thesis is based on extracted methods technology and techniques for rapidly building group ware applications and allowing the capture of complete replayable transcripts of user activity in an integrated lifecycle
93. alette has an oval artifact selected the canvas has nothing selected and the mouse action is a click and drag an oval will start to be drawn However the palette has the SELECT action selected the mouse is clicked within an already drawn oval and the mouse action is a click and drag the already drawn oval will be resized on the canvas The basic shared whiteboard is shown in Figure 3 10 This component collection is a mostly strict WYSIWIS groupware application CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 82 RECTANGLE OVAL LINE FREEDRAW TEXT SELECT CLEAR_ALL CLEAR_LOCAL DELETE Quit User List Chooser Figure 3 10 The shared whiteboard All artifacts that are done being drawn are replicated on every canvas s application When an artifact is being drawn or being changed it is updated at intervals on other client s canvases while being updated continuously on the canvas of the client that is updating the artifact The shared whiteboard adds the SharedWhiteboardArtifactMessage It is shown in Definition 25 Definition 25 SharedW hiteboardArtifactMessage ARTIF ACT CLIENT DATA ARTIFACT ACTION Where ARTIF ACT ACTION is one of MODIFY DELETE CREATE CLEAR The shared whiteboard application is defined by the set ARTIF ACT MODEL ARTIF ACT F ACTORY CANVAS VIEW PALETTE VIEW The whiteboard information is ultimately positional The major externality that this compone
94. ally scattered In such cases much more work needs to be done by the representation system to maintain augment and repair common ground These systems are the ones we are interested in primarily since they are the direction where strong collaboration techniques can be most valuable There is an additional challenge such as in the team room environment where some participants are col located and others are remote Maintaining common ground among all participants when the interaction between some members of the community is highly asymmet ric requires a more complete and precise collaborative environment than when all participants are on equal footing The public private dichotomy of information refers to adherence to strict WYSI WIS principles as illustrated in Figure 2 2 Some models of simple collaboration such as DISCIPLE WDM99 use a replicated user interface model In this model the same user interface exists in each user s version of the application All manipula tion of the data is reflected on all users interfaces One advantage as illustrated in DISCIPLE is that single user representations can quickly become multi user repre sentations through purely technical manipulations Strict WYSIWIS as shown by Stefik however is not how people think about CHAPTER 2 RELATED LITERATURE 32 interaction Not all data is naturally shared during a collaborative task A user for example may not want to share data that is still a
95. amatically during development It is this model that can leverage analysis as part of the software development cycle CHAPTER 7 THE LIFECYCLE REVISITED 144 With a model that assumes change as part of the development process such as the evolutionary models analysis can be a very powerful tool Analysis tools and tech niques can be provided to sufficiently advanced prototypes The result is information that helps to measure and judge how the system will need to be altered to handle the community s needs However even in an evolutionary model system modifica tion is not free Whereas bug reports and user feedback often provide information that is used for guiding the system change it is subjective and possibly inaccurate Ethnographic analysis provides directed and precise information regarding what in the system may require alteration 7 2 The Integrated Lifecycle The integrated lifecycle answers one of the major deficiencies in software development once you have feedback from a system in the form of defect reports user questions and other general feedback how do you know precisely how to change the system to satisfy that feedback How do you know what feedback is meaningful and relevant to the community of users of the application versus feedback that is only related to a particular user s desires Simply how do you know how to direct the development activity to best solve the problems that are relevant to the largest set of
96. amework provides a component model and a rich set of groupware component libraries Through a combination of altering exist ing components creating new components and reusing existing components complex groupware applications can be built The component model is governed by a set of properties These properties de scribe the interaction between components Orthogonality for example describes whether or not components interact with one another in a larger system partitioning the application so that the impact of adding removing or changing a component is limited The interaction between components also enables transcription which will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter The case study presented in this chapter shows how an example application may be built through assembly of existing components The ORA system is complex application that provides same time different place interaction over a shared web browser a chat room and a shared marking surface By leveraging the existing component oriented THYME applications a compan ion replay application can be generated to allow replay of the original application s transcripts of use In the next chapter the SAGE framework will be described which provides this capability Chapter 4 Observational Analysis of Groupware Applications The complexity of software applications can often be ameliorated by providing the developer with tools that help in development oriented ta
97. andle most of the burden of setting up the THYME infrastructure In this onComplete method the SharedTreeModel is created and initialized with the widget identifier The model is registered with the room client allowing it to send and receive messages from THYME The initial node is created and inserted into the model The tree is then created the model registered and added to a JFrame to be displayed It is left to the developer to determine how to add remove and change nodes in the tree One example implementation has a popup menu as part of a custom JTree implementation C 6 Specification Files The final part of the implementation is to inform the room of the new carb type and tell THYME where to find the widget This task is handled through specification files APPENDIX C THE THYME WIDGET TUTORIAL package widgettest component import java util Collection import javax swing import thyme id ThId public class SharedTreeClientInit extends RoomClientInitAB public SharedTreeClientInit ThId id Collection args super id args public void onComplete super onComplete WidgetIdentifier wid new WidgetIdentifier shared tree demo test SharedTreeModel model SharedTreeModel getComponentModel getComponent shared tree model wid toHashKey model setWidgetIdentifier wid getRoomClient registerThId model getThId DefaultMutableTreeNode node new DefaultMutableTre
98. apter discussed the use and implementation of the customized replay appli cation supported by the SAGE component library and application generation tools This application fulfills a key need in the building and testing of groupware applica tions by allowing the analysis of how the application is used during a collaborative session In showing the need of this capability the problem of how to build such applica tions where few extra resources are available needs to be addressed A methodology for generating these applications was detailed which greatly reduces and in some CHAPTER 4 OBSERVATIONAL ANALYSIS OF GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS113 cases eliminates the cost of constructing the replay application This chapter also presents the instrumentation and transcription techniques that are part of the THYME framework Structural instrumentation allows meaningful manipulation of a THYME application Transcription provides the record of the application usage that the SAGE application can replay In the next chapter how THYME has been used in the class room is discussed One example Human Computer Interaction class taught at Brandeis University used THYME to build their term projects Their experiences provide evidence of how THYME can be used with great success in the rapid development of analyzable group ware applications Chapter 5 Distributing Computing Applications The two previous chapters have discussed the THYME compon
99. are part of the group All components in the group will presum ably apply the message to their state and update their visual component Grouping can be done explicitly by sending a message requesting a grouping to a widget or implicitly by naming the widget as part of a group All widgets will check to see if CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 71 they are receiving a message from a grouped component before applying the message All widgets produce and accept two messages the WidgetGroupingRequestMessage and the WidgetGroupingResponseMessage The WidgetGroupingRequest Message is described in Definition 14 The WidgetGroupingResponseMessage is described in Definition 15 The application of a widget grouping request is shown in Definition 16 Definition 14 The WidgetGroupingRequestMessage is defined as W idgetGrouping Request Message WIDGET GROUP WIDGET IDENTIFIER REQUEST ACTION Where REQUEST ACTION is chosen from the set JOIN GROUP LEAV E GROUP Definition 15 The WidgetGroupingResponseMessage is defined as W idgetGrouping ResponseMessage WIDGET GROUP WIDGET IDENTIFIER RESPONSE ACTION RESPONSE RESULT Where REQUEST ACTION is chosen from the set JOIN GROUP LEAVE GROUP Where RESPONSE RESULT is chosen from the set FAILURE SUCCESS Definition 16 The result of the application of a WidgetGrouping Request Message is as follows APPLY WIDGET GROUP WIDGET IDENTIFIER REQUEST ACTION WIDGET
100. arly negative score as it may be difficult to find the first barrel of waste and thereby increase your score In time the team will be proficient enough to achieve high scores D 3 Planning and the Planning Window The various activities executed by each ship in VesselWorld must be planned out in a step by step fashion This is done through use of both the World View and the Planning Window A plan must be submitted by each captain each step The system will then determine what will actually happen based on the three plans At most one step will be executed for each captain D 3 1 Planning in the World View Clicking on the World View will create a list of steps in the Planning Window required to make that action happen You can only perform actions on objects in your affectible range Remember a step will not actually be performed until each captain submits it via the Shared Planning window APPENDIX D VESSELWORLD USER MANUAL 232 World View Activities All Vessels Move Click on an empty location in the World View An unburdened ship will move at most 100 grid points for each step in fair weather Cranes Only Lift Click on a barrel of waste to lift and hold it Carry Click on an empty location while holding a barrel Drop Click on the crane while holding a barrel Load Click on a barge while holding a barrel Unload Click on a barge that contains a barrel while not holding a barrel Deploy Undeploy Click on the crane while not ho
101. ary for the mediating application to help the users stay coordinated The maintenance of this coordination is a key requirement of a groupware application It provides the means to interact with the task and the other members of the community of users through communication tools such as chat rooms and task representations The combination of the task related and communication related tools aims to keep all members of the community of users synchronized with respect to the state of the task the state of other members of the community the future state of the task and the future intent of other members This shared understanding of the task intent and state is called common ground Cla96 When the common ground becomes unsynchronized breakdowns in the collaboration may occur An online collaboration can be defined by three vectors of classification The first two detailed by Johansen Joh88 and Ellis et al EGR91 and illustrated in Figure 2 1 are temporality and locality The third detailed by Stefik et al SBF 87 is the public private dichotomy of information CHAPTER 2 RELATED LITERATURE 30 Same Time Different Time Same Place Same Place Watercooler Hall Whiteboard Collaborator allway Whiteboar Temporality Chat Room Bug Tracker Same Time Different Time Different Place Different Place Locality Figure 2 1 Temporality and locality matrix Temporality determines the synchronicity of activity Are the participants
102. ation s models are eliminated from the transcript The result is a transcript that contains no secondary messages such as those generated CHAPTER 4 OBSERVATIONAL ANALYSIS OF GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS111 e 7 tugl mX at 400 125 IOTA 7 waste mx 400 125 8 cranel medium at 392 127 IOTA 8 waste m 392 127 9 cranel that s got to be the same one I OTA 9 repair IOTA 8 IOTA 7 10 tugl yep IOTA 9 11 tugl that s an mX OTA 7 waste mx 392 127 Figure 4 6 A sample discourse tagging by models in response to external input This transcript is complete with respect to the granularity that the playback application is capable of showing Combined with the timestamp ordering of the transcript many of the non deterministic concerns expressed by Ronsse et al RDC t03 are eliminated 4 6 Other Visualization Techniques One application of the transcription of THYME applications is called Lyze built by Alexander Feinman for analyzing the structure of the discourse of collaboration Lyze uses the SAGE framework to extract the discourse from a collaborative session s transcript The discourse is fed into the Lyze discourse tagger which an analyst then uses to tag the referential structure of the collaboration These tags describe the information flow between the users of the application Each piece of information is called an iota An example tagging can be seen in Figure 4 6 The information contained in the tagging of the
103. ation of the basis application and the replay application component framework as shown in Definition 29 Definition 29 A replay application for an application A is defined as REPLAY APPLICATIONs BASIS APPLICATION REPLAY APPLICATION FRAMEWORK The generation of the application is done by selecting the aspects of the basis application that are to be replayed The actual selection is done through the SAGE application generator shown in Figure 4 4 eee pviews room login view incoming chat view 0 ian fixed text artifact factory workforce user palette view room chooser gail fixed text artifact factory D z i chat communication model transcription listener default swing transcription listener default room manager pmodels Se eee F bob fixed text artifact factory swb mode manager 0 t4g carb SynchronizedScrollPaneActionCarb ui event processor 0 synchronized scroll pane m callback handler hal fixed text artifact factory g gt cece fixed text artifact factory default room client manager swb palette model fau fivad tawt art ifart fartnru a Enter carb class Generate SAGE Application Figure 4 4 The SAGE application generator Determining how to leverage the basis application components relies on being able to identify the components their properties and their use within the applica
104. building the application The next section shows a case study for this lifecycle In Fall 2002 a group ware application called Workforce was implemented to test collaboration in group scheduling in conjunction with the Eugene M Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst This application leveraged the Coun terstrike Strategy application which was one of the example projects discussed in Chapter 6 Although the application shown is distinct from the original application CHAPTER 7 THE LIFECYCLE REVISITED 147 it benefits significantly from the original application The total engineering time from inception to deployment including deployment of the replay application was approximately twelve hours 7 3 The Workforce Application In conjunction with the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Mas sachusetts at Amherst a groupware application was constructed in Fall 2002 to study group decision making and teamwork This application was designed to support sev eral participants in multi hour problem solving sessions based on a domain and task formulated from the University of Massachusetts colleagues It was required that the application generate an analyzable transcript of use and ship with an analysis application The deployed application was produced in twelve hours of implementation time and is shown in Figure 7 5 The associated replay application is shown in Figure 7 6 It was based on
105. can be altered so that each client can have a different view of the information However the ability for clients to have different sets of information is not found in GROOVE Each GROOVE client can only be part of one collaborative space at a time 2 4 The Remainder of the Thesis Groupware construction techniques support the building of the application with re play and transcription techniques supporting ethnographic analysis It is assumed that software is expensive to build and is perpetually allocated too little or just enough resources The budget may not support the activity of constructing of replay tools or adding analysis steps to the software development activity Therefore if these techniques are to see active adoption the requirements to adopt them must be minimized Software technology support needs to be brought to the problem which CHAPTER 2 RELATED LITERATURE 49 leads into the thesis problem how can toolkits enable this activity The thesis problem defines the requirements for the software support to a software development model that supports the development and refinement of collaborative applications A toolkit needs to aid in the rapid development of the groupware appli cation If the application is to be refined the schedule needs to allow time for that refinement as well as the data collection and analysis that comes before the refine ment Once the prototype is deployed transcription needs to occur which needs
106. cation s life time The transcript and replay techniques discussed in this dissertation is multi faceted The techniques are based around a component framework and a software library that aids in the building of collaborative applications by providing a software infrastruc ture This framework is based around the interconnection of functional components The transcript of user activity can be collected through the instrumentation of com ponents and their interconnections The replay tool can be constructed through a combination of the replay framework replay components and existing components from the original groupware or basis application As the components in the basis system change so do the components in the replay tool The reference framework showing these capabilities is called THYME It provides the infrastructure for building component oriented groupware systems To aid in the rapid development of these systems it also provides a library of pre existing subsys tems both utility subsystems such as communication protocols and methods and collaboration subsystems such as chat rooms and shared whiteboards These pre existing components are built to be orthogonal to other components meaning they have reduced coupling with respect to other components Thus new features and functions may be added into a collaborative system without affecting an already run ning and functional system Developers of systems that are built with this fra
107. chat room component was unchanged from the original version detailed in Chapter 3 The majority of the changes occurred in the shared whiteboard component col lection The underlying artifact model needed to be changed to support multiple palettes both to populate those palettes as dynamic components and to accept re quests from them The final implementation has the shared whiteboard artifact man ager able to expose palettes to a subset of available artifacts The manager contains separate lists of artifacts and passes each palette its self selected list of those artifacts The modified shared whiteboard component collection that is used in the Work force application is defined by the set CHAPTER 7 THE LIFECYCLE REVISITED 152 Canvas View S c h e d u a l i n g P a l e t t e Tool Palette View Incoming Chat View Outgoing Chat View Panic Button Figure 7 9 Layout of the component views in the workforce application ARTIF ACT MODEL ARTIFACT FACTORY SCHEDULING PALETTE VIEW PALETTE VIEWCANV AS VIEW The final application consists of the component collection set SHARED W HITEBOARD COMPONENT COLLECTION CHAT COMPONENT COLLECTION SHARED BUTTON WIDGET The replay application for the Workforce application is partially generated using the SAGE application generator shown in Chapter 4 The only aspect of the applica tion that was not generated and populated from the basis application was th
108. chats iface ChatManagerCIF User seth Date Jun 8 2003 Time 10 22 52 AM public class ORAClientInit extends RoomClientInitAB public static final String ID Id ora source code appendix tex 161 2005 08 07 12 42 12Z seth public ORAClientInit ThId id Collection args super id args protected SWBManagerCIF getSWBManager return SWBManagerAB getExistingManager public void onInit APPENDIX B SOURCE CODE TO THE ORA APPLICATION 196 ArtifactFactoryCIF af getSWBManager getArtifactFactory List 1 getParameterManager getParameterAsList swab factory typed factories for Iterator it l iterator it hasNext String fac_name String it next ThId fid getIdManager getId fac_name getThId getInstancelId TypedArtifactFactoryCIF fac TypedArtifactFactoryCIF getBlocManager getBloc fid af registerVisibleTypedArtifactFactory fac protected ChatManagerCIF getChatManager return ChatManagerAB getExistingManager public void onComplete super onComplete super do_start_room_client RoomClientCIF rc getRoomClientManager getRoomClientNew ModelRIF history_model getTubeManager getHistoryModel history_model asBloc ensureReady re registerThId history_model asBloc getThId ModelRIF chat_model getChatManager getChatCommunicationModel chat_model asBloc ensureReady rce r
109. class had only 28 days to implement their projects A key point is that the students designed their system without any knowledge of the THYME framework sample THYME applications or any knowledge of the THYME capabilities During the prototype implementation stage the class was given access to the THYME framework the Shared Whiteboard and the Chat Room They had access to both the class library and the source code They were also given a template project a simple THYME application that showed how to embed both the shared whiteboard and chat room components in a single application Of the fourteen teams twelve teams completed applications that were able to be tested A usable application was defined as one that was sufficient to obtain user feedback regarding its appropriateness to the task and generate a transcript of use As a point of comparison a similar class was taught in the Fall semester of 1999 when the THYME framework was not available but some sample groupware code was distributed In this previous class the teams were given 49 days to implement their applications 21 more days than the 2002 class Nevertheless the previous class CHAPTER 6 USE OF THYME IN THE CLASSROOM 125 14 days Description of system users and tasks This task required the teams to interview some sample users of their proposed application and design sample scenarios of the application s use 21 days Initial design In this task the teams designed the in
110. computing http today java net jag Fallacies html 4 2 Berkeley Distribution Talk 1993 S M Easterbrook CSCW Requirements and Evaluation chapter Co ordination Breakdowns How flexible is collaborative work pages 91 106 Springer Verlag 1996 Clarence A Ellis Simon J Gibbs and Gail Rein Groupware some issues and experiences Communications of the ACM 34 1 39 58 1991 Kate Ehrlich Designing Groupware Applications A Work Centered De sign Approach John Wiley and Sons Ltd 1999 W Keith Edwards and Elizabeth D Mynatt Timewarp techniques for autonomous collaboration In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems pages 218 225 ACM Press 1997 Alexander Feinman and Richard Alterman Discourse analysis techniques for modeling group interaction In Ninth Internation Conference on User Modeling 2003 Alexander Feinman Seth Landsman Joshua Introne and Richard Alter man VesselWorld user manual Technical Report CS 04 246 Brandeis University 2004 Martin Fowler UML Distilled Addison Wesley 2003 Gregg Foster and Mark Stefik Cognoter theory and practice of a colab orative tool In Proceedings of the 1986 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work pages 7 15 ACM Press 1986 H Garfinkel Studies in Ethnomethodology Prentice Hall 1967 BIBLIOGRAPHY 165 GHIJV95 gro Gro95 HALO04 HK97 Hut95 Hut96 1A03 ice03
111. ctor The ChatRoom code that we implemented here does not actually process the RoomRegistrationCarb messages These carbs are handled by the RoomAB imple mentation that we are extending Messages are not consumed so they can be received and processed by multiple components which lets the room abstract implementation for example handle the registration messages In the handleChatCommunication method the ChatCommunicationCarb mes sage is sent using the sendToClients method This method is another feature of the RoomAB abstract class it ensures that the message is delivered to all currently registered clients The last part of the component that needs to be implemented is the constructor A component is constructed by the Bloc Manager only You should never construct a component via the new SomeComponent statement To facilitate the proper con struction of a component you should use the standard constructor method which takes in the assigned THYME Id ThId and a Collection of arguments which are currently vestigial The recommended constructor can be seen in Figure A 8 Any initialization work that you wish to do should be put in the onInit method which will be called when entering the INITIALIZED lifecycle stage The ChatClient View The first step for building a client is the same the component needs to determine what superclass it will extend what roles it will fulfill and what capabilities it will provide APPENDIX A
112. d After Used As Never Never Reworked Changes Delivered Successfully Used Delivered Or Aba doned Figure 1 1 A congressional GAO study CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 4 1 1 Online Ethnographic Analysis of Online Be havior A user centric application is typically adjusted to its community of users through the following procedure Ehr99 1 A groupware application is developed that reflects the initial customer require ments 2 User feedback is collected from focus groups during the testing of the applica tion 3 Potential customers work with early or beta versions of the software and their feedback helps the developers tune their software before deployment 4 Opinions are collected from focus groups Other low tech forms of obser vations provide additional feedback these include looking over the shoulder interviewing users and collecting defect report 5 Given feedback from initial deployment of the application it is further modifed before its release Once the deployment of an application has succeeded its use in the field may or may not be as envisioned by the designers of the system Different groups of users may have needs that are mismatched with the way the application was designed Thus usage patterns frequently vary from what the developers expected A small change in expected user behavior might for example result in a significant deviation from the expected usage An application s inc
113. d based on the new capability In implementing these capabilities a policy object is created which describes how a message can be applied to a component based on information such as the sending component and the user who is associated with the sending component The message router object is then responsible for enforcing that policy The router may not deliver a message delay the message or transform the message based on the instructions associated with the policy Further action may then be taken by the receiving component which would take actions that are specific to the collaboration or component 8 1 2 More Utility Applications The SAGE framework has been used extensively for the analysis of groupware appli cations However the general concept of generating customized utility applications from the basis groupware application deserves further exploration THYME provides the means to extensively instrument and introspect an application One proposed utility application in a similar vein as SAGE may provide aid to the testing of an application and re creation of defects in the application itself TICK The Introspection Tool Testing a dynamic multi user application is a difficult undertaking requiring exten sive testing of combinations of components However it can be shown that testing of a dynamic application will never be complete MLP79 LS00 Mus75 The TICK introspection tool aims to give the developer a visualization
114. d interface Because the model is a THYME component and can be easily changed THYME widgets do not have to be strict APPENDIX C THE THYME WIDGET TUTORIAL lt xml version 1 0 gt lt system spec file version 2 0 gt lt description gt Client to test the shared tree author seth cs brandeis edu lt description gt lt include file t4g spec t4g xml gt lt parameters gt lt parameter name tcc init class id value null component gt lt parameter name tcc init room id value default room gt lt parameters gt lt init class widgettest bloc SharedTreeClientInit gt lt components gt lt component id shared tree model class widgettest component SharedTreeModel gt lt components gt lt system gt Figure C 11 The client specification WYSIWIS components 218 This tutorial will be used in the Software Engineering class that will be taught in Spring 2005 at Brandeis University Appendix D VesselWorld User Manual Welcome to VesselWorld This program is a simulation of a naval environment in which three ships must work together in order to remove barrels of toxic waste from a harbor As the captain of a crane you must travel around and pick up barrels of various sizes As the tug captain you will assist the cranes in waste transport by pulling small barges To clear the harbor the captains of the ships must create plans which will be submitted to the system in a step by step
115. derstanding and formalizing the properties of an application the application can be manipulated This chapter also showed the range of applications that have been created using our groupware techniques Our criteria is supported by this framework allowing the rapid development and rapid alteration of a groupware application To support the analysis of a groupware application two capabilities were also CHAPTER 8 SUMMARY AND FUTURE WORK 158 identified The first is the creation of the transcript during the run time of the application A number of necessary properties of this transcript were introduced in Chapter 2 and further refined in Chapter 4 A property collected transcript can be used for both ethnographic and quantitative analysis The other properties focus around the creation and support of the replay application If ethnographic analysis is to be realized the application that provides the capability must be cheap or costless to built and to maintain The SAGE framework provides an implementation of the capacity for an over the shoulder model of observation analysis In the approach discussed here the SAGE replay application is generated from the basis groupware application providing the majority or in some cases all of the work required to construct a replay application As the application changes this application will need to be updated another process that can be reduced or automated by the techniques described in this wo
116. described CHAPTER 5 DISTRIBUTING COMPUTING APPLICATIONS 116 in Definition 31 and 32 respectively Definition 30 Given a bus component B B has the following properties CONTAINED IDENTIFIERS B h h In ROUTING RULES B RULE RULE RULEN When B receives a message it will attempt to apply each routing rule in sequence A rule has a signature of ROUTING RULE B I M Where B is the bus I is the identifier of the sending component and M is the MESSAGE Definition 31 The circuit bus NGT92 is a bus that contains a set of numeric ordered categories in which each contained identifier is placed A category can hold multiple identifiers To send a message to a circuit bus that sending component must already be a subscriber to the bus The routing rules are as follows ROUTING RULE Seircuit vus B RULE RULE B I M 1 set C the category of the sending identifier 2 if C is invalid return 3 C the category succeeding C where if C is the last category C is the first category 4 D is the set of all identifiers in the category C 5 route M to the set D CHAPTER 5 DISTRIBUTING COMPUTING APPLICATIONS 117 Definition 32 The broadcast bus is a bus that redistributes a message to all con stituent components The broadcast bus can optionally rebroadcast the message to the sending component The routing rules are as follows ROUTING RULESproadcast bus B RU LE RULE RULE B I M 4 4
117. dvantages not found in other techniques External forms of ethnographic analysis such as videotaping activity will result in missing information that may be critical to determining how the collaborative task progressed Determining through an external ethnographic record how one user s action influenced another user s application context requires extensive knowledge of the internal workings of the collaboration An external perspective does not allow such software based causal links to be tracked With the replay method described herein the context can be built up incrementally and it is possible to understand the effect of each action taken by any member of the group Searching and classifica tion of activity is also possible when analysis is integrated into the application For example a user interface designer interested in learning how a specific grouping of widgets is used may want the replay to stop at every access to those widgets which requires the replay application to be able to detect access to those widgets An exter nal collection perspective would not have that capability Overall the integration of analysis into the application provides access to the usage patterns and gives a much deeper understanding of how the system is used and what changes need to be made to the application Defect reports and other subjective data about the application lack context and precise definitions of what was being done Quantitative measures
118. e Target Id Data 1 Data 2 Data N Figure A 1 THYME objects 3 Component1 adds data to message A 4 Componenti sends the message to its local routing component 5 The local router finds which component message A is addressed to 6 The router delivers message A to the proper component 7 The router discards the reference to the component 8 Component2 extracts the data from Message A and processes it Specialization These objects have specializations A specialized object can be used as if it were the base object type or it can be used as the specialized type The major specializations APPENDIX A THE TINY THYMER 173 for each object are shown below e Component Specializations Service A service component provides an easily accessible singleton compo nent Services are per node or per application components which while they act as components have a simpler access pattern due to their unique status within an application e Message Specializations Action Message This message is one that informs a component of a change request For example telling a component that it should logout This message is generally a one way communication from one component to another Request Message This message is usually paired with a response Its purpose is to request information or that a verified change is made to a component This will result in a response being sent to the calling compone
119. e The shared table pro vides a widget that replaces javax swing JTable providing a replicated data model CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 76 but a relaxed WYSIWIS view in this case the column sizes and table widths Like the shared tree the API associated with the table model inheriting from javax swing table TableModel provides methods to manipulate the data such as adding removing and altering table cells It also provides an API for adding removing and moving table rows and columns The API provides the same locking API as the shared tree This widget defines the ShareTableActionMessage and is shown in Definition 21 Upon receiving the message the table s content is updated Definition 21 The SharedTableActionMessage is defined as SharedT able ActionMessage WIDGET IDENTIFIER WIDGET GROUP SHARED TABLE ACTION TABLE CELL Where SHARED T ABLE ACTION is chosen from the set ADD CELL REMOV E CELL REPLACE CELL ADD ROW DELETE ROW ADD COLUMN DELETE COLUMN The shared table has a production SharedT ablep oa set of SharedT ableFieldprop WidgetGrouping Request Message W idgetGrouping ResponseMessage SharedT able ActionMessage The acceptance set SharedT able is the same Shared List The shared widget replaces javax swing JList and provides a replicated set of data the list contents but a relaxed interface the user s selection The associated model and API is based on the sha
120. e encoded in the RoomRegistrationCarb and ChatCommunicationCarb respectively Handler methods for these two messages will need to be built The receive method APPENDIX A THE TINY THYMER 191 public void receive CarbIF carb ThId source if carb instanceof ChatsCommunicationCarb handleChatsCommunication ChatsCommunicationCarb carb source else if carb instanceof RoomRegistrationCarb handleRoomRegistration RoomRegistrationCarb carb source Figure A 11 Receive method for ChatClient View protected void handleChatsCommunication ChatsCommunicationCarb carb ThId source if carb getActionType equals ChatsCommunicationAction COMM_FROM_ROOM tfInComm append carb getLogin carb getMessage n J Figure A 12 handleChatCommuncation method for ChatClient View that is written to capture these messages can be seen in Figure A 11 The code to handle the communication utterance is in Figure A 12 It will place an appropriate message in the incoming communication text area If a chat client were to implement a history mechanism for example it would add to the history buffer in this method This component will look for a client registration message only to inform the user that a new client has joined the chat room The code for this is in Figure A 13 Any other action that might be necessary to react to a registration carb is handled by the superclass The last part that this component i
121. e Application THYME Application Specific THYME Groupware THYME Groupware Distributed Groupware Features Tools Widgets Component Sec 3 2 2 Sec 3 2 1 Model Sec 3 1 THYME Component Collection Chapter 5 THYME Core Figure 3 3 Layers of THYME libraries In this chapter the features of each of these classes is discussed as are their capabil ities This chapter concludes with a discussion of how THYME components can be assembled into a complete application 3 1 Distributed Component Model The THYME distributed component model defines the objects that exist in a THYME application and how they interact within the context of the application 3 1 1 Parts of the Model There are five types of objects with each object in a THYME application being classifiable into one of these types Figure 3 4 based on the chat room system de scribed above shows the two major types of functional objects that exist within an application the component and the service Components interact with each other to perform the activity of the application Services are components that are part of the underlying THYME infrastructure and provide resources and basic functionality for the components CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 54 lt e Outgoing Chat Component Vie
122. e a complete tran script 2 Since all messages go through routing components only the message routers need to be accessed in order to record all the messages To collect the usage transcript for an application the message routers collect all messages at their point of origin defined as the first message router that handles the message This approach ensures that every message is logged once and only once As a router collects messages it sends the message to the transcript collector component This component will store all messages it receives thereby building the transcript This component forms a unified interface to the transcription subsystem abstracting the means by which the transcript is stored and reconstructed and allowing different transcription formats and strategies to be used without changing the application Figure 4 2 illustrates the interaction of a THYME application with the transcription subsystem CHAPTER 4 OBSERVATIONAL ANALYSIS OF GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS99 looks at action data changes Controller data update Transcript Ul Collector actions aa Transcript Figure 4 2 Logging messages in a THYME application Each transcribed event in the THYME framework is stored with two timestamps when it is first handled by a router and when it is actually transcribed The two timestamps give sufficient data for clock skew correction to be performed if necessary The timestamp is
123. e also discussed and developed to address the effective building of groupware applications 1 3 The Thesis Problem Transcription and replay are still open research problems for the software engineering community Prior work in this area produces parts of the functionality required by the analyst but no one application provides the complete set of capabilities outlined above Some applications are specifically designed to allow for the collection of ag gregate information but not a replay of domain actions SCFP00 Other systems generate complete transcripts of domain actions but do not classify domain actions into type so the playback of these transcripts cannot automatically stop at different kinds of events EM97 KF92 Yet other systems only collect transcripts of interface events SCFP00 NS83 RDCT03 A generalizable groupware construction toolkit requires several technologies first technology for transcribing system usage must be available This step should be as transparent and costless as possible Second the replay tool needs to be built as cheaply as possible If there is a large cost associated with the replay tool the CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 22 tool will not be kept up to date as the application is being developed Finally both transcription and replay need to be available throughout the development and de ployment of the application This research aims to provide techniques to meet these needs throughout the appli
124. e disciple syn chronous collaboration framework In Proceedings of the 3rd IASTED International Conference on Internet Multimedia Systems and Applica tions IMSA 99 1999 WebEx Corporation Webex http webex com David Whitgift Methods and Tools for Software Configuration Manage ment John Wiley amp Sons Inc 1991 Microsoft windows operating system http microsoft com windows Zhonghua Yang and T A Marsland Global snapshots for distributed debugging In Fourth International Conference on Computing and Infor mation pages 436 440 1992 Appendix A The Tiny THYMEr A 1 Introduction This document covers the building of a THYME groupware application based on the THYME 1 0 platform released in October 2002 This document will cover the basic THYME concepts that are used throughout this tutorial and explain how to achieve a working THYME environment A 2 Concepts This section will discuss the THYME concepts that are used in building the basic THYME groupware applications These include the types of objects that make up a THYME application the infrastructure that THYME provides and how to use it and the specification of a THYME application 170 APPENDIX A THE TINY THYMER 171 A 2 1 Objects THYME provides for five different types of objects components messages data identifiers and helpers Each of these objects fulfills a specific function for building a large THYME application Component T
125. e panic button CHAPTER 7 THE LIFECYCLE REVISITED 153 The resulting application is shown in Figure 7 6 The center replay window consists of five major components starting from the top left and going clockwise they are the workforce canvas the user palette the shape palette the chat panel and the panic button usage With the exception of the panic button usage each of these components is identical to the ones found in the basis workforce application The playback control window shown in the picture is the unmodified SAGE playback controller The panic button cannot be replayed using the components from the basis applica tion because it is a relaxed WYSIWIS component Each client has a status associated with his panic button that the analyst wants reported This information includes when the panic button was last pressed and when the panic was acknowledged On the bottom of Figure 7 6 this information is presented for all users in a collaboration session The necessary messages to encode this information are already included in the transcript 7 3 3 Deployment of the Workforce Application The Workforce application was deployed at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst during the Spring 2004 semester Problem solving sessions lasted one to two hours each Each session consisted of four to six participants During these sessions tran scripts were collected from the application After the transcripts were collected they we
126. e re barte S Base waa tt op Oke hws S iia paee Bens Ne ole Aeon lens 223 D 8 A small barge ue Ns desks ek Se Oe fe Nh nde ae oe Ae ds hice oe Ok 224 D 9 The control center e t Bho ioe co oie oe ee PE eee RS 225 D 10 The marker list tae BOs tee ot Sas ae i at wa aoe ene we ek BE ds eke 226 D 11 Adding a marker a hk wo We Se heheh Hie Genel Wactealy chm ig Goede Ache ie Gee 227 D 12 The weather window oaoa a OE OREO 228 D 13 The information window ooo a el ae ek de ee ee Oe 2 229 D 14 The legend window lt ae eeu dh Sees seks Goes oy BY exe hme WY Ewe 230 D 15 The score window oh whe a Ole Se oh ae Seale HR wets ee end 231 D 16 The planning window kg 46h 4 4 Mb Payee SE w EEN 233 D 17 The chat window 2 ack G4 oe Bate Bw bath Gia 2 Be oe PS 235 D 18 The object list window amp os ai og ata a ae oben ee Ao deere 236 D 19 The strategic planning window 2 0 0 237 Chapter 1 Introduction Businesses are becoming increasingly globalized and major organizations and corpo rations act as distributed enterprises with offices employees clients and consultants spread throughout the world People in different locations need to collaborate to achieve company and organizational goals In person meetings are desirable and ef fective but the cost of travel can be an unaffordable luxury expensive in terms of material costs but also in the time spent away from the office and the associated lost p
127. e system and the results of submitting a plan APPENDIX D VESSELWORLD USER MANUAL 225 Figure D 9 The control center APPENDIX D VESSELWORLD USER MANUAL 226 D 2 3 World View This grid shown within the Control Center provides all visual information about ship and waste location The check boxes in the lower right corner allow customization of the World View Chart shows hides the lined grid overlaying the ocean Zones shows hides the white and blue circles surrounding the ship Markers shows hides any markers you have placed Trace shows hides a line and point trace of the planned motion of a ship Labels shows hides labels from objects hiding labels is useful if the area becomes too cluttered Zoom Zooms in to show the area around the ship useful in tight situations D 2 4 Markers Markers Figure D 10 are signal points placed on the World View to keep track of object locations A Marker can only be seen by the captain that placed it They serve as a temporary way to mark a location Clicking the Markers button along the top of the Control Center will open the Marker List window This window shows the names and locations of all currently placed markers and provides ways to manipulate the markers Adding a Marker Click the Add button in the Marker List window Figure D 11 Next click the location in the World View where the marker is to be placed A Marker Label APPENDIX D VESSELWORLD USER MANUAL 227
128. eNode root model setRootNode node JTree tree new JTree tree setModel model JFrame f new JFrame f getRootPane setLayout new BorderLayout f getRootPane add tree f packQ f setVisible true Figure C 9 Initializer source 216 APPENDIX C THE THYME WIDGET TUTORIAL 217 lt xml version 1 0 gt lt system spec file version 2 0 gt lt description gt This is the room for the widget tests author seth cs brandeis edu lt description gt lt include file t4g spec t4g xml gt lt init class alias default room init gt lt parameters gt lt parameter name tcc init classid value default room gt lt parameter name t4g room forwarded message value widgettest messages SharedListMessages widgettest carb SharedTreeMessage gt lt parameters gt lt system gt Figure C 10 The room specification C 6 1 The Room Specification File The first specification task is to alter is the room specification file widgettest room xml The forwarded messages parameter needs to be appended to include the SharedTreeActionCarb as shown in Figure C 6 1 C 6 2 The Client Specification File The second specification task is to create the client specification file shared tree test client xm This file should be created as in Figure C 6 2 C 7 Conclusions The tutorial demonstrates how THYME widgets can be created These widgets present a simple way to create a share
129. ed when a message router is told to send a message to a component in a different node This connection is established and kept open with each node accepting the other node into its neighborhood If there are nodes that are likely to be in communication during the application session connections between nodes can be established on start up of the application For example in a room based application clients come on line with connections already established to the room The node neighborhood for some node N is represented by Nyy and is a set of nodes A sample node neighborhood for an example node A is represented by the dashed box in Figure 5 1 Directed lines represent a message that was sent from one node to another Note that since node FE and node F have not sent or received a message from any node in A s neighborhood they are not part of the neighborhood THYME also provides a way for nodes to make themselves known prior to an explicit connection being made through the message router A service called the node registrar can be used by a node to register its existence A node can request the set of registered nodes from the registrar and use this list to populate its node neighborhood The complete discovery process is shown in Definition 34 Definition 34 The discovery process for some DISCOV ERY PROFILE DP be ing initiated from some node N is described as DISCOVER DP N forally M NyN N DISCOVER DP Neomponents
130. edn ie eae 189 A 10 actionPerformed method for the ChatClientView 190 A 11 Receive method for ChatClientView 191 A 12 handleChatCommuncation method for ChatClientView 191 A 13 handleRoomRegistration method for ChatClientView 192 A 14 onInit method for the ChatClientView 192 C 1 Room based communication 0 0 0 0000 4 208 C 2 Widget class inheritance ac 0oo 4 oe 4 G ae ce eee 209 C 3 Partial implementation of SharedTreeActionType 210 C 4 Partial implementation of SharedTreeActionMessage 211 C 5 Partial implementation of SharedTreeModel 212 LIST OF FIGURES xii C 6 Partial implementation of SharedTreeModel 213 C 7 Partial implementation of SharedTreeModel 214 C 8 Example tree operation 0 2000002 ee eee 214 C 9 Initializer source 2S woo 8 Boh oh eid or ee ee ee Be ee 216 C 10 The room specification tae a tae Ste op ee te peers 217 C 11 The client specification xd le aoa a a a 218 D 1 The login window aoaaa aa a ke pee aoe 220 D 2 An inhabitant and its zone 5 ae Soe hg eee Bock ces Bot 220 D 3 Cranes equipment and joined operation 221 D4 AGT Sn Shes desk kanea Ae etd Meee als ce Daa a ee Datla ele 222 D 5 A barrel of toxic waste 5 ety os tah ea he he SE ANS cee he 222 D 6 A leaking barrel of toxic waste 64 Sece4 ee SA ek ae 223 D Th
131. egisterThId chat_model asBloc getThId VisibleViewRIF ora_view getORAView ora_view asBloc ensureReady rce registerThId ora_view asBloc getThId ModelRIF am getSWBManager getArtifactManager am asBloc ensureReady rc registerThId am asBloc getThId ora_view setVisible true APPENDIX B SOURCE CODE TO THE ORA APPLICATION protected VisibleViewRIF getORAView return VisibleViewRIF getBlocManager getBloc ora view getThId getInstancelId public void onReset super onReset getTubeManager getHistoryModel asBloc getORAView asBloc setShutdown protected TubeManagerCIF getTubeManager return TubeManagerAB getExistingManager package orav2 bloc import import import import import import import import import import import import import User tcc role SwingViewAB java java java java util Collection awt awt event ActionListener awt event ActionEvent thyme id ThId thyme role ViewRIF javax swing t4g iface swabv2 iface SWBManagerAB swabv2 iface SWBManagerCIF swabv2 bloc PaletteView gump awt FullsizeLayoutManager seth setShutdown 197 APPENDIX B SOURCE CODE TO THE ORA APPLICATION Date Jun 8 2003 Time 10 23 02 AM public class ORAView extends SwingViewAB implements ActionListener public static final
132. en by every captain The cranes may load waste on the Large Barge In order to successfully complete the mission all waste must end up on the Large Barge so that it can be removed from the harbor The Large Barge has an unlimited capacity for waste The Small Barge sbrg One or more Small Barges see Figure D 8 may be available nearby These can be pulled around by the tug in order to transport waste that is too large for the cranes to move or to move several smaller waste barrels at once Once loaded Small Barges must be pulled by the tug to the Large Barge where they can be unloaded by the APPENDIX D VESSELWORLD USER MANUAL 224 Figure D 8 A small barge cranes Small barges can carry a large but limited amount of waste totaling a weight of 130 This breaks down to 2 extra large wastes and a small waste 3 large wastes and a small waste or a large number of smaller wastes D 2 Information and Manipulation of Vessel World D 2 1 Control Center Figure D 9 is the main Control Center window All other information activity win dows may be opened by clicking on the corresponding button located across the top of the Control Center These buttons will flash whenever new information is available in the corresponding window D 2 2 Messages The status of the system can be ascertained by checking the Messages panel near the top of the Control Center This area will display important messages about the current mode of th
133. ent it needs yet tug1 Yeah just leave it there and I ll identify it Where is it cranel Ok made an object ticket for it pc Send Show Communication History Show Object List Figure D 17 The chat window D 4 2 Object List The Object List Figure D 18 is used to keep track of the various barrels of waste in the harbor All captains have access to this list and all changes made to this list will be available immediately to the other captains No submission of changes is needed To add a new object click the Add Object button This creates a blank row in the list Fill in the Object name by clicking on that column and typing in the appropriate label Location is designated by clicking the Location column and clicking the proper location on the World View Equipment and Status are entered using pull down menus Notes can be added by clicking in the column and typing on the keyboard During the course of the mission the objects can be updated via the same methods that were used to enter them Objects can also be deleted by selecting the desired object and clicking the Delete button The Object List automatically sorts the objects by default it sorts them according APPENDIX D VESSELWORLD USER MANUAL 236 rT LOLE Small 7 Unknown x Located Not Leaking X Location Size Equipment Action Leak Notes Add Entry Clear Fields Equipm Action Leak Miirmny waste 4712 Small Unknown _ Located No
134. ent model the group ware component libraries and how the component model can be manipulated to construct the replay application Groupware applications are at their core dis tributed applications Whereas the THYME framework provides support for building groupware applications it also provides a library that aids in the construction of dis tributed applications These capabilities are subsumed into the THYME groupware framework and are identified as the THYME Component Collection in Figure 3 3 These components displace the complexities of building distributed applications by providing components that handle the common functions that these applications de pend on such as discovery multi component routing and transcription across nodes They take advantage of the properties of network routing as discussed in Chapter 3 but work completely within the boundaries of the THYME component model 114 CHAPTER 5 DISTRIBUTING COMPUTING APPLICATIONS 115 5 1 Multi Component Routing The THYME network routing model provides the means to deliver a message to a set of components so long as the identifier that is associated with those components is known If the routing pattern is simple in that it is one component to a set of known components the provided model is sufficient If the pattern is more complex such as a publish and subscribe pattern where the publishing component does not have visibility into the subscribed components the basic ro
135. ent reference C Ch should be equivalent per definition 5 to Cg M is then delivered to the resulting Cp Using the THYME chat room Figure 3 7 illustrates another routing example A new chat communication message is sent to the message router from another source The message is addressed to the chat communication model identifier The message router looks up the component reference and delivers the message to the model The model then dispatches a message to the incoming chat view so that the utterance contained in the original message can be displayed Again the message router looks up the identifier of the incoming chat view and delivers the message Network Routing Network routing is an extension to the basic model of component routing and adds the capability for components to communicate across different process spaces result ing in inter process and inter host message passing In the THYME network model all components are contained within a specific ser vice called a node The node provides the infrastructure for the general management CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 65 object reference for Component B Message M Component A Message Router Message Component Repository Component Id for Component B Message Target Id Data 1 Data 2 Figure 3 6 Basic THYME component interaction CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 66 Outgoing Chat View
136. essages that are used to communicate between the components For example that chat room component collection consists of the incoming chat view the outgoing chat view the chat commu nication model and the chat communication messages Some teams changed the chat components in such a way that they serve a vastly different purpose than intended In the RA Scheduler system for example the chat communication model was modified and the incoming chat view extended to allow the manipulation of a calendar The new incoming chat view would send a new chat communication message containing structured information as the payload When the model saw this structured informa tion it would pass the information to the new view effectively resulting in a shared calendar This type of modification is one that is not recommended because of the potential change of expected component properties CHAPTER 6 USE OF THYME IN THE CLASSROOM 135 6 4 Conclusions In allowing the Human Computer Interaction class to use the THYME framework for building groupware applications we have collected evidence as to how the frame work and component model is adopted Our data shows that the class adopted the component model behind THYME and were successful in its use with twelve of the fourteen teams of students developing applications that are usable and analyzable in only 21 days of implementation time Based on the breadth of different projects that were implemented by the
137. ework and sample code that was given to the class and the resulting project The formula used is seen in Equation 6 1 This formula calculates the line count of the changes the team made to the existing code and the Non Commenting Source Statement NCSS score ncs03 of the new classes that were added to the existing code The results are this calculation for some of the implemented projects is shown in Table 6 1 difference NCSS of New Java Files cvs diff u we l 6 1 The source code given to the class had an NCSS of 11 347 The average project had an NCSS of 12 289 with a standard deviation of 947 The calculated difference was CHAPTER 6 USE OF THYME IN THE CLASSROOM 132 an average of 2012 5 from the distributed framework and source code The standard deviation of the difference was 833 Project Name NCSS New Code Changes Difference ORA 3282 SALSA 2289 OGRE 2452 RA Scheduler 569 Counterstrike 1684 Dominos 2095 Crossword 1717 THYME 11347 Table 6 1 Measured changes for the different projects Changes to THYME Codebase m New files m Changes to existing files 3500 3000 2500 2000 1500 1000 500 Jainpayys yy ayluyssaqunoD pJOMSSOID souwog YSTIVS J490 vuo Figure 6 5 Chart of project data As illustrated in Figure 6 5 the students used three strategies for implementing their projects using the THYME framework build new components identified by
138. ext to the time display is the current message and the total number of events in the session Movement within the session can also be CHAPTER 4 OBSERVATIONAL ANALYSIS OF GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS105 timestamp 1125589555700 position 71 135 Last Event tube carb TubeActionCarb Event type tube carb TubeActionCarb Figure 4 3 SAGE playback controller controlled via a slider callout 4 at the bottom of the window The slider provides feedback as to where in the session the current timestamp is with the far left of the slider being the beginning of the session and the far right being the end The analyst can manipulate the slider causing the playback tool to go to the event closest to the timestamp selected 4 5 Generating the Replay Application Building a replay application as a custom application for each basis application is an impossible strategy As development budgets are reduced any significant investment in building tools is likely to be cut outright However if these applications could be generated it still provides a basis for further customization then the tools may be available at a greatly reduced cost especially for the benefits demonstrated previously Given a basis groupware application the goal is to generate a replay application CHAPTER 4 OBSERVATIONAL ANALYSIS OF GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS106 based on the components and structure of the basis application Formally the re play application is a combin
139. fashion Success is achieved when all three ships coordinate their efforts to clear the area as quickly as possible and deposit all the waste found on a barge ready for transport from the harbor D 1 Starting Up D 1 1 Logging in The first window the users will see is the Login Window Figure D 1 Enter a name and click Login It is important that each captain uses the same name from mission 1This material originally found in FLIA04 219 APPENDIX D VESSELWORLD USER MANUAL 220 Please enter your username oain Figure D 1 The login window Figure D 2 An inhabitant and its zone to mission D 1 2 The Inhabitants of VesselWorld Each captain will be in command of a single ship in the VesselWorld system The ship being controlled will be drawn in red other ships will be drawn in white Each ship is surrounded by a white circle that denotes the affectible range of that ship The affectible range will decrease depending on whether waste is being carried and the current weather conditions Figure D 2 illustrates how the zone appears in the application There is also a blue disk around each ship indicating its field of vision A captain will not be able to see any objects outside this area with the exception that all ships know where the Large Barge is at all times and the tug also knows where all the Small Barges are at all times This area may also be affected by inclement weather APPENDIX D VESSELWORL
140. framework as a general capability not specific to the existing collections Its use in the application was much simpler than that of SALSA it was a simple toggle either the clan leader had control of the floor or not When the leader had control only he could affect the components When the leader relinquished control anyone could speak This application had a two stage use case In the first stage the clan leader would propose a strategy by using the chat room and shared whiteboard When the leader was happy with the strategy as laid out he would open the floor for comments and general discussion before the game Both the chat room and shared whiteboard were altered by this team The shared whiteboard was modified to have a different icon set and allow for a background image The chat room and shared whiteboard were modified to allow for floor control messages to be used The CounterStrike client application is defined by the set CH AT COMPONENT COLLECTION SHARED W HIT EBOARD CHAPTER 6 USE OF THYME IN THE CLASSROOM 130 COMPONENT COLLECTION FLOOR CONT ROL MODEL where CH AT COMPONENT COLLECTION and SHARED W HIT EBOARD COMPONENT COLLECTION are versions of CH AT COMPONENT COLLECTION and SHARED W HITEBOARD COMPONENT COLLECTION that support floor control and the other enhancements described above Floor control adds another message the FloorControlMessage that is propa gated to the clients The floor control message
141. g the runtime of an application a is represented as TRANSCRIPT If each instant of change that occurred during the runtime of a is contained in TRANSCRIPT then TRANSCRIPT is a complete transcript of the runtime of a The transcript collects into a transcript containing both interface events and do main actions Interface events can be encapsulated as messages to an interface con troller and thereby are collectable in the transcript Because messages between com ponents are encoded in terms of the representation system of the application the information contained in the message includes domain action information For exam ple a message passed from one client s chat room component to another client s chat room component contains information that the message is a chat message Thus during replay the analyst can run the replay until it comes to a chat message Alter nately if users are collaboratively constructing a plan in a shared window messages between client planning components will contain information that enable the precise replay of planning actions 4 4 2 Replay Replay of a transcript is enabled by the SAGE component library It provides access to the collected transcript and enables a replay application to build a complete state of the basis application at a precise level of individual messages Given a basis application A and a collected transcript T of size S replaying T CHAPTER 4 OBSERVATIONAL ANALYSIS OF GROUPWARE A
142. gned to be reversible as doing so puts a large burden on the developer to track state and limit actions on the application data Without reversible messages actions such as rewinding an application s state are difficult A brute force example of rewinding state could consist of selecting the desired point in the transcript resetting the appli cation and applying all messages up to the newly desired timestamp Early versions of SAGE provided such a mechanism which was quickly deemed unsatisfactory Since the data that makes up a THYME application is stored in components to implement a proper rewinding mechanism for a transcript requires each component to be capable of rewinding its state To accomplish rewind across all types of compo nents SAGE provides a set of component wrappers based on a design pattern called mementos GHJV95 A wrapper s internal state is actually a collection of milestones which are indexed instances of the component it is wrapping Each index refers to a CHAPTER 4 OBSERVATIONAL ANALYSIS OF GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS103 specific message number in the transcript Milestones are laid out so that to retrieve an instance that corresponds to a timestamp previous to the current one it is only necessary to find the milestone that is closest to but previous to the desired times tamp The components at that milestone are then copied and any messages that exist between the desired timestamp and the current component set
143. h the benefit is clear if an extensive investment is required the technology will not be used Further the techniques need to be part of the lifecycle otherwise they may not be used to the best effect This thesis proposes techniques to build analysis into the software system from inception of the development of the application The proposed software lifecycle and associated software support include the ability to transcribe and replay user activity CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 26 as mediated via a groupware application From analysis enabled by application re play necessary changes to the application can be proposed and through a software framework that supports it rapidly applied to the application for further deployment and analysis These techniques should be as costless as possible so that they are used as part of the system development process 1 5 Organization of the Thesis In the next chapter the state of the art in the construction of groupware is discussed This chapter discusses existing groupware toolkits and frameworks and discusses cri teria for comparing groupware frameworks Chapter 3 introduces the THYME groupware framework which is the reference implementation of our groupware construction techniques This chapter presents a formal description of the framework and discusses the provided rich component library of groupware tools infrastructure and functions This chapter also presents two groupware applications that
144. h the forward and reverse directions without any modification In cases where a model cannot be wrapped a new model or custom wrapper needs to be implemented which can accept the SAGE replay messages This situation is uncommon however This new set of SAGE models is referred to as Msage The second step identifies the set of views that are part of A Views that depend on models do not need to be changed they will continue to pull the data from the models and be updated appropriately In this step however views can be added or replaced by the developer if desired For example in a replay tool the view that corresponds to a relaxed WYSIWIS view may be replaced with one that provides an omniscient view of the activity The new set of views is called Veage In the last step the replay application is constructed SAGE provides a set of components SAGE REPLAY that are used in the replay of applications These components provide the means for moving forwards and backwards in the timestream that is exposed by a transcription and getting the messages to the components for which it is replaying The new SAGE application Asage is the set of components V M SAGE REPLAY The generated application performs two functions The first is to pre process the transcript to be played back This pre processed transcript TRANSCRIPT is a strict subset of the original transcript In this subset all events that are not directly accepted by the playback applic
145. have been implemented using the THYME framework Chapter 4 introduces the SAGE replay framework our reference implementation of the replay and replay tool generation techniques This chapter showcases the instrumentation capabilities of THYME and our techniques for transcription and replay Chapters 6 and 7 present two case studies The first case study describes a class in Human Computer Interaction that made use of THYME in building their term projects The second case study shows how one of the applications built in the Human Computer Interaction class was significantly modified to study teamwork at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst This thesis concludes with a study of proposed future work and a summary of the CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 27 existing work s contribution to the field The appendices at the end of this dissertation are existing tutorials that accom pany the THYME framework the VesselWorld user manual and the source code to an example application the Online Research Application Chapter 2 Related Literature This dissertation shows groupware applications can be built and rebuilt efficiently and rapidly analyzed through a number of means including ethnographic analysis This analysis directs what changes should be made to the application so that it better supports the task it mediates This chapter presents an overview of the literature covering previous work done in this field The next section presents a
146. he previous two chapters a key facet required by the integrated lifecycle is a foundation for building groupware applications This foundation realized as a software framework needs to be able to rapidly build analyze and rebuild groupware applications It should provide an extensive infrastructure that saves the developer from having to implement common distributed application functions such as networking discovery and registration It should also generate the transcript of use This chapter presents the formal definition of a groupware framework called THYME that implements part of the software foundation required to support an integrated lifecycle for building groupware applications THYME is a component oriented message passing architecture that aids in the construction of groupware applications and reusable groupware components The message oriented nature en courages loose coupling between components limiting the scope of changes making larger scale reuse possible and simplifying the use of a rich library of groupware com ponents that can be embedded into applications Built in capabilities provide tran scription and a companion framework SAGE allow replay of collected transcripts 50 CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 51 The component oriented and message oriented construction also supports the rapid modification of the groupware application after analysis has been accomplished To support rapid construction and
147. hese are the actors of an application They drive the activity within it by communicating and directing other components with messages Message These act as the verb of the application Components send messages to direct the action of other components Data These objects provide the payload associated with messages A message gen erally has several data objects associated with it Data objects are also used to keep track of the internal state of a component The component s state should be serializable to a data object and thereby transportable and re creatable Identifier Identifiers provide the ability to refer to other THYME objects usually components indirectly Having an indirect reference simplifies for example network communication between components Helper These are static objects that are used to transform data or otherwise perform stateless functions For example the component helper will take the specifica tion of a component and instantiate it Figure A 1 shows a minimal THYME application where all these objects interact In this example the following actions occur 1 Component1 creates a message A via the Message Helper 2 Component addresses message A with Component2 s identifier APPENDIX A THE TINY THYMER 172 object reference for Component B D i Message M Message Router Component Repository Message Component Id for Component B B Messag
148. ility as described in Chapter 4 acceptance and production sets and other semi structured information that can be defined as part of the component A service called the finder takes the profile from the requesting component and returns the set of identifiers This process is described in Definition 33 Definition 33 A discovery profile 1s described as DISCOVERY PROFILE FIELD VALU E FIELD VALU E FIELDn VALUEN Each component has an associated profile described as COM PONENT PROFILE FIELD VALU E FIELD VALU E FIELDN VALU Ey The discovery process for some DISCOVERY PROFILE DP run on some composite component COM POSIT E DISCOVER DP COMPOSITE VcI CI COMPOSITE V FIELD VALUE FIELD VALUE COMPONENT PROFILEpesoive cn FIELD VALUE DP and returns the set of component identifiers whose resolved component s component profile have matching values for the fields that both the discovery and component profile contain In the networked THYME application the set of components that can be discov ered is the set of all components on all nodes that are associated with the application This discovery process involves searching all nodes that are within the node neigh CHAPTER 5 DISTRIBUTING COMPUTING APPLICATIONS 119 borhood of the application The node neighborhood is a graph that represents a node and the connections it has to other nodes Connections to other nodes are creat
149. in the activity working on the task at the same time Is the task one that requires simulta neous cooperation and coordination to complete The other end of the spectrum is where the task does not require any simultaneous activity all activity is expected to occur at different times or at least is not bounded by a strict cadence of work in order to complete Another data point on the temporality vector is autonomous collabo ration EM97 where activity is synchronized around specific points of coordination but some of the sub goals of the task are completed independently Locality refers to the location of participants in relation to one another Same place collaboration at one extreme of the vector talks about all participants be ing collocated Collocated participants have a number of advantages since common ground is significantly augmented by having access to body language intonation of speech and other such high bandwidth and hard to reproduce modalities Systems CHAPTER 2 RELATED LITERATURE 31 Same Data Subset Different Views Strict Relaxed Same Data Subset Different Data Subset Same Views Different Views Figure 2 2 The WYSIWIS spectrum like Cognoter FS86 take extensive advantage in their collaborative design from all participants being in the same room easing the maintenance of the collaboration The opposing end of the vector talks about different place collaboration where par ticipants are geographic
150. ion 18 The SharedButtonActionMessage is defined as SharedButtonActionMessage WIDGET IDENTIFIER WIDGET GROUP SHARED BUTTON ACTION Where SHARED BUTTON ACTION is chosen from the set BUTTON ACTIV ATE CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 74 The shared button has an acceptance SharedButtonacc and production SharedButtonprop set of W idgetGrouping Request Message WidgetGrouping Response Message SharedButtonActionM essage Shared Text Field The shared text field is a widget that replaced javax swing JTextField and is another replicated widget Each keystroke typed in the text field results in a SharedTextFieldActionMessage sent to all components in the same widget group This message is shown in Definition 19 Upon receiving the message the text field s content is updated to the value of the message Definition 19 The SharedTextFieldActionMessage is defined as SharedTextFieldActionMessage WIDGET IDENTIFIER WIDGET GROUP SHARED TEXT FIELD ACTION VALUE Where SHARED TEXT FIELD ACTION is chosen from the set SET V ALUE The shared text field has a production SharedTextFieldproa set of SharedTextFieldprop WidgetGrouping Request Message WidgetGrouping ResponseMessage SharedTextFieldActionMessage The acceptance set SharedT ext Fieldacc is the same Shared Tree The shared tree is a widget with replicated data but a relaxed view of the data This widget replaces the javax swing JTree
151. ion between collaborators Both of these methods try to leverage more of the intangible benefits of collocality for communication as part of the information stream They do have some disadvantages The major issue is that they capture only part of the intangible information Over a VTC the direct presence of the other collaborators CHAPTER 2 RELATED LITERATURE 33 is not transmitted resulting in extra effort to pay attention to the people on the other side of a VTC These methods also require extensive bandwidth and development to bring into a collaboration and are susceptible to less than ideal network conditions such as increased latency The trade off of bandwidth development time and other conditions may not be worthwhile for many groupware environments If the requirement to simulate collocality is dropped other tools can be used to ensure that the necessary information is sent between collaborators These tools try to model the communication channel with the direct needs of the collaboration Textual chat such as that provided by IRC OR93 the Unix talk protocol Dis93 or AOL Instant Messenger Ame03 is another example Textual chat allows collabo rators to communicate via a purely text interface with the information being entirely unstructured Some tools such as those based around the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol XMPP SA or Unix talk provide presence information about the user s activity The talk protocol i
152. ions are implementations of common groupware metaphors like shared surfaces applications and the chat room Both sets of capabilities are detailed in this section 3 2 1 Groupware Widgets Widgets provide the most basic form of groupware collaboration A set of widgets of a compatible type are grouped together and exist distributed across the collaboration All widgets in a group will receive a message that is sent by any widget in the group Depending on the widget all widgets in a group will be replicated versions present different views of the same information or act on the message that one widget sends out For example shared scrollpane widgets have replicated viewport positions but their contents are not necessarily the same THYME shared widgets are user interface objects that are backed by THYME components The current implementation of the THYME groupware component col lection uses user interface UI objects from the Java Foundation Classes JFC Jav03a also known as the Swing UI framework In practice once a widget is constructed it can be used in place of the basis UI object The component that acts as the UI object s model handles the sending of messages based on the user s inter action with the UI object and receives messages from the widget s group Received messages affect the content that is presented to the user Widgets are grouped so that a message originating from one widget is sent to all other widgets that
153. is defined by the tuple CLIENT DATA FLOOR CONTROL ACTION where FLOOR CONT ROL ACTION is chosen from the set ACQUIRE CONT ROL RELEASE CONT ROL REQUEST CONTROL 6 2 5 Dominos The Dominos application allows a team of people to play a game of dominos This game uses a modified shared whiteboard to show the domino pieces allow rotation and to enforce the game rules This team also implemented additional components to show the user s hand and to allow drawing from the boneyard the pile of unclaimed dominos 6 2 6 Crossword The Crossword puzzle application allows a team of players to jointly solve a crossword puzzle This team implemented a new component set that showed the crossword puzzle artifact Each time a user pressed a key a message would be sent to all other clients updating the value of the crossword square that the user had highlighted A screenshot of this application in use can be seen in Figure 6 2 6 CHAPTER 6 USE OF THYME IN THE CLASSROOM 131 Send Quit Chooser Figure 6 4 Screenshot of the group crossword puzzle 6 3 Analysis To understand how the THYME framework was used in this class the source code of the projects was analyzed A measure of roughly how much work the teams put into the projects was established The implementation work of each team was measured by calculating the difference between the given fram
154. ld Instantiation mode Then click on the name of the object you want to copy in the Object List itself The name given to that object or its location as appropriate will be copied over Third you may copy information directly from the World View to do this enter Field Instantiation Mode as above by clicking on the field you wish to fill in and then click on the appropriate object or location in the World View itself If you want to cancel the copying of information to a field exiting Field Instantiation Mode simply hit Enter when your mouse is in that field Note that you do not have to fill in all fields before the item can be added to the plan Also if you wish to clear all the fields at once you may used the Clear button at the far right of the palette When the item is filled out you can place it in the Strategic plan by clicking on the cell in the table where you want to put it Depending on what table mode you are in clicking will have different effects What happens when you click Insert Mode Inserts the new entry after the spot clicked on Overwrite Mode Overwrites the spot clicked on with the new entry Delete Mode Deletes the cell or row clicked on The Copy A Cell button lets you copy the contents of a cell back into the palette To do this click on the button and then click on the cell you want to copy To abort copying a cell click on the Copy A Cell button again The final field on the far right of the
155. lding a barrel Special equipment must be deployed before it can be used to aid in the lifting a barrel Join Action Click on the other crane then click to perform the desired action Must be done by both cranes in the same step Tugs Only Attach to a small barge Click on the barge Remaining attached will stabilize a barge Detach from a small barge Click on the tug or barge while attached to a barge Seal waste Click on a leaking barrel to seal it APPENDIX D VESSELWORLD USER MANUAL 233 Lift waste Carry waste to 4452 66 Carry waste to 41291 Carry waste te 409 93 Show planning history Figure D 16 The planning window D 3 2 Planning Window As each activity is performed in the World View it will be recorded in the Planning Window Figure D 16 in a step by step sequence Notice that the plans of the other two ships are also displayed The steps of this plan will not be executed until they have been submitted via the Planning window Clicking on an individual step in the plan will update the World View to represent how the world will look like once all steps up to the selected one have been submitted Editing and submitting the plan There are several buttons in the Planning Window which manipulate how the plan is constructed Submit Executes the first step in the plan The system will then lock the World View until each captain has submitted a step APPENDIX D VESSELWORLD USER MANUAL 234 Home Res
156. lection defines a message the SharedEditorMessage It is shown in Definition 27 Definition 27 SharedEditor Message OF FSET LENGTH TEXT EDITOR ACTION Where EDITOR ACTION is chosen from the set INSERT DELETE CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 85 This is a test document ABC Client 1 Client 2 4 gt Quit User List Chooser Figure 3 12 The shared editor The shared editor does not have a rigourous conflict resolution capabilitity As is the default in all THYME applications actions taken by users are applied in a first in first out serial ordering In the case of the shared editor there is a single master model that is used by all participants in a shared editor session so all actions are serialized against that model The resulting effect is that the shared editor buffer will remain in a consistant state although there may be social conflicts such as a user erasing a section of text as another user is trying to modify it A mechanism to better handle such conflicts has been discussed as potential future work 3 3 Case Study Building a Groupware System Using THYME Given the framework for building groupware and rich library of widgets and com ponents it is possible to assemble complex groupware applications This case study CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 86 discusses how an application can be assembled out of existing components The Online
157. lyst 1 The chat window 2 The current plans of all the users this view is the omniscient perspective of the participants plans 3 The layout of the task environment the harbor and the location of all ob jects again this view is from the omniscient user perspective 4 An annotation window that can be used by the analyst to comment on a par ticular state of the problem solving session 5 The controller for the playback device 6 A list of shared markers created by the users The controller enables the analyst to step through the data using any number of metrics e g it can move forward to the next communication round or bookmark The analyst can also fast forward through the data The controller displays informa tion about the current round being represented the current time and the number of rounds in the session CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Tj incomingcommunkeationview M BlanningletView M crane1 wiating cranel icranel Move to 47 starting round 2 crane2 guys someone moved my label unex1 l starting round 3 e ug1 Sorry Someone added one as was moving my label crane2 E starting round 4 starting round 5 Sun Feb 11 20 10 26 EST 2001 POBE T z Location Leak author 382 333 7 Not Le cranel 46 188 x Not Le tug 421445 Large xs Not Le cranel 182 111 small sil Not Le tug 36545 Small Not Le tug 216 312 Small Not Le
158. lyze them to gather statistics as to how the application was used how CHAPTER 2 RELATED LITERATURE 40 particular participants performed as a measure of their interaction with the application and other similar measures Table 2 2 summarizes our discussion of prior efforts at playback in the terms of the criteria we have developed In particular ethnographic analysis is best served by search precision and annotation capabilities Application Search Precision Annotation Aggregate Information jRapture No time ui none none Playback No time ui none none CollabLogger No none none yes Videotape No time yes none Table 2 2 Playback features 2 3 Engineering the Groupware Application A groupware application has a significant engineering cost associated with it They are necessarily complex software applications needing to handle networking data synchronization complex user interfaces and distributed computing concerns In all engineering groupware is a non trivial task Additionally groupware applications may need to have features added removed or significantly changed as a result of ethnographic analysis If the application needs to be changed traditionally the cost of altering a deployed application is very great Bro95 However if the complexity of the groupware infrastructure can be off loaded into a framework the cost of engineering and changing the application can be reduced This section will disc
159. me tcc init room id value default room gt lt parameters gt lt blocs gt lt bloc id ora view class orav2 bloc ORAView gt lt bloc id ora manager class orav2 bloc DefaultORAManager gt lt blocs gt lt system gt lt xml version 1 0 7 gt lt system spec file version 2 0 gt 204 APPENDIX B SOURCE CODE TO THE ORA APPLICATION 205 lt description gt This is the room for the ORAv2 application author seth cs brandeis edu lt description gt lt include file t4g spec t4g xml gt lt init class alias default room init gt lt parameters gt lt parameter name tcc init classid value default room gt lt parameter name t4g room forwarded carbs value swabv2 carb SWBArtifactActionCarb tube carb TubeActionCarb chats carb ChatsCommunicationCarb t4g carb SynchronizedScrollPaneActionCarb gt lt parameters gt lt system gt Appendix C The THYME Widget Tutorial C 1 Introduction This chapter is the tutorial for building THYME widgets that was written by Johann Larusson and Svetlana Taneva during the Spring and Summer of 2004 The document reproduced here is based off of the second version of this tutorial C 2 About The Tutorial This tutorial covers the process of development of shared widgets that are written for the THYME component framework It is assumed that the user of this tutorial has basic knowledge e Good knowledge of the JAVA programming la
160. mestamp ordered set of messages that are sent within the application Each message represents a discrete instant in the run time of an application This complete list of messages representing the run time of the application is the transcript The property of time is referred to as t s where s refers to the specific message that is placed in the transcript as M _ As a refinement to specifying a component after message Mp a component can also be referred to as incorporating all messages up until a time s shown as C The difference between the two representations is that the component C means that it is part of a system that has incorporated all messages that have been seen by the system up to and including the message M _ Whereas the notation Ca means the component C has had directly applied on it all messages up to and including M and no assumption has been made about the other aspects of the application A composite application uses the same notation A composite component that is part of an application that has seen all messages up to and including M is shown as COM POSIT E which means that all its constituent components has a state of Cres A range of time or timeslice is shown as t x y This range is inclusive and represents each message at each instant between and including x and y Formally the timeslice t x y is expanded to V i x y Mi The timeslice that refers to the entire session of an ap
161. mework are encouraged to construct orthogonal subsystems as they construct the application leading to a growing library of reusable components In Figure 1 7 the shared web browser subsystem is detailed showing the interconnection of its components Transcription is accomplished through the THYME framework s property of being CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 23 Web Browser View c ao s Router Web Browser Model Web Browser Manager Foreign Router Figure 1 7 The shared web browser component layout a message passing architecture Individual components and their interactions are firmly rooted in how they send and receive messages with the transcript being a collection of these messages Very little work is required to allow components to send and receive messages since each component extends the THYME abstract classes which are already par ticipants in the message interaction Further the classification of components by which messages they send and accept provide the basis for instrumentation of com ponents This instrumentation at the component level provides semantic meaning to the messages While the typical information of where the mouse was clicked exists in the transcript it also contains the fact that the mouse was clicked on the open URL button which resulted in an OpenURL message being constructed and sent In Figure 1 8 this method is illustrated A message leaves the toolbar component is
162. mined with a large degree of precision and accuracy responding to the elicited and observed needs of the community In the example analysis shown two users with the pseudonyms Tom and Jerry are using the baseline version of ORA Jerry is an ORA developer and researcher who is assisting Tom in finding papers relevant to a specific topic Figure 4 1 shows a segment from this analysis session This analysis has three major stages 1 Initial exploration of a university library that fails because of limitations in the web browser associated with the ORA application CHAPTER 4 OBSERVATIONAL ANALYSIS OF GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS93 2 Transition to another citation database the Citeseer database and resynchro nization of the user s common ground 3 Successful completion of the task The first part of the session starts with the interaction between Tom and Jerry taken verbatim from the transcript Tom Hi Can you help me to find articles or books on mutual belief I am par ticularly interested in representation and mutual belief But first the general concept of mutual belief Jerry sure let s start in the library Tom wait what did you just do Through the use of the SAGE replay application it is shown that this dialogue corresponds with Jerry going to the library website The page loading gives no feed back to the user who did not initiate going to the new website This confusion as to what Jerry is doing results in
163. mmediately sends every character typed by the user giving constant updates as to what other users are typing and whether or not they are currently typing XMPP constantly broadcasts information as to whether the user is actively using the XMPP client Shared whiteboards like Tivoli PMMH93 and Commune BM90 provide a vir tual drawing space that is shared over non collocated environments A surface is provided that can be decorated with various types of markings including images shapes text etc These markings can be manipulated by some or all of the collab orators Further these markings may be overlaid on the task representation For example marking up a map with battle instructions is a common application of this communication device The last collaborative tool is the shared application Often collaboration will take place around an already existing application For example collaborative research CHAPTER 2 RELATED LITERATURE 34 may need shared use a web browser or a specialized information retrieval application Collaborative tools like NetMeeting Mica or WebEx Web provide such capabilities WebEx a tool that is built around the foundation of sharing an application to a group of users has been selected for the Next Generation Collaboration System Pilot NGCS P by the Department of Defense Information Systems Agency DISA A subset of application sharing is the sharing of an application capability A shared web browser fo
164. mplements is a lifecycle method Lifecycle hooks allow a component to have a set of post constructors which are called during different stages of a component s use The most basic one is the onInit lifecycle method which is where component initialization takes place Code that would oth erwise be in a constructor can be called here In the case of this component this is APPENDIX A THE TINY THYMER 192 protected void handleRoomRegistration RoomRegistrationCarb carb ThId source if carb getActionType equals RoomRegistrationAction CLIENT_HAS_REGISTERED if carb getThId equals getThId tfInComm append NOTIFICATION successfully joined n else tfInComm append NOTIFICATION carb getLogin has joined n Figure A 13 handleRoomRegistration method for ChatClient View public void onInit setLoginName String getParameterManager getParameter login setTitle getLoginName getThId getDataChannellId makeUI Figure A 14 onInit method for the ChatClient View where the UI is built See Figure A 14 As in the ChatRoom the designated THYME component constructor is used Appendix B Source Code to the ORA Application B 1 package orav2 package orav2 public class Constants public static final String ID Id ora source code appendix tex 161 2005 08 07 12 42 12Z seth public static final String VERSION 1 0 B 2 package orav
165. mponents are modified instead of new components being added and the new component replacing the existing component through identifier manipulation The fact that this approach was taken points to an area of complexity in the framework that needed to be ad dressed The current documentation and mechanisms for replacing components at run time we believe address this deficiency The second type adding components is one of the expected means of extending a THYME application Some projects added their own components to their systems referencing them using new component identifiers and subsuming existing message types or defining their own Some modified or extended components made reference to CHAPTER 6 USE OF THYME IN THE CLASSROOM 134 these new components for example CounterStrike s use of the FLOOR CONT ROL MODEL The next type extending components is also an expected means of modifying a THYME application In this type of modification existing components were ex tended through subclass or object wrapping means They took new class names and were placed in the application as replaceable or similar components or added to the application as wholly new components Often these components such as in the case of floor control enabled components would be used as new versions of existing components The final type eluded to previously it the hijacking of components Each com ponent collection consists of a set of components and the m
166. n overview of groupware applications the different metrics by which they can be categorized and the different types of commu nication that can occur between system participants Section 2 2 discusses the dif ferent techniques available to analyze groupware applications providing a spotlight on methods related to transcription and replay Section 2 3 discusses the different techniques for engineering groupware applications exploring especially groupware toolkits This chapter concludes with a summary that situates this work s techniques in the literature and shows the gaps that this work addresses 28 CHAPTER 2 RELATED LITERATURE 29 2 1 Groupware Applications Groupware applications are complex multi disciplinary systems A groupware ap plication that is usable by a community of users needs to be constructed to support their task The design of the application including the understanding of how to best structure the data the interface and properties of the interaction needs to further support and improve the community s collaboration Implementation should focus on leveraging existing groupware implementations and toolkits where appropriate This section will discuss how groupware can be constructed by looking at the the ory surrounding constructing collaboration applications both from the cognitive and technical parts of the field In order for a community of users to engage in a computer mediated collaboration it is necess
167. nclusions are drawn as to whether or not the representation system collaboration metaphor and other user oriented development choices are proceeding along the correct path In the requirements phase analysis and the results of the risk analysis are used to determine how the system features and implementations must change to support the needs of the community of users and their associated behavior The advantage of such a lifecycle lies in the capacity to draw informed conclusions of how the application is being used Risk analysis is enhanced because the actuality of how the users interact with the application is visualized and decisions can be made more accurately as to how the application should be changed The ability to reproduce defects in the context of the application also aids significantly in the reproduction of defects and adds to the precision of determining the details of the defect Building groupware applications requires software support in providing libraries and tools Development of large scale software projects as discussed in Chapter 1 also requires structured support of the development process The integrated lifecycle is designed to support the process of building groupware allowing the developer to construct the application rapidly analyze the usage of the application by a community of users and provide support to alter the application without losing the investment in the application or requiring another major investment in
168. nd replay of groupware activity is critical to online ethnographic analysis While touched on previously it is necessary to determine the exact requirements that a candidate analysis solution must possess 4 3 1 Transcription Many of the features of a replay tool depend on the quality of the transcript Online ethnographic analysis is best supported by a complete transcript where each state of the collaboration can be reconstituted It is important that this transcript be complete for both user interface and domain actions as both types of information can be critical to understanding the collaboration process As shown in Table 4 1 the approach taken by THYME and SAGE accomplishes these requirements THYME collects information from both user interface and do CHAPTER 4 OBSERVATIONAL ANALYSIS OF GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS96 main actions by collecting messages as they are used within the application during run time The messages are used to reconstruct the state of the collaboration as an additive process Application Complete Info Type Transitions Off line jRapture UI UI transitions none Playback UI UI transitions none TimeWarp domain domain transitions none Videotape none N A states video THYME and SAGE both both transitions none Table 4 1 Transcription features 4 3 2 Replay The replay aspect of online ethnographic analysis processes the transcript so that the analyst can view the collaborative activity fr
169. ndToClients new ChatsCommunicationCarb ChatsCommunicationAction COMM_FROM_ROOM carb getMessage carb getSender carb getLogin Figure A 7 Handler for chat room communication All messages that are sent between components implement a common interface thyme carb iface CarbIF Therefore to get specific fields of a message it needs to be cast to the specific type This is done via a dispatch pattern The receive method looks at the message and sees if it matches one of the messages that it knows how to handle A component that does not handle a message it receives will silently ignore it with no ill effects The result of changing the receive method so that it dispatches appropriately can be seen in Figure A 6 The receive method will dispatch to an appropriate handler which will then actually process the message In the case of the communication messages the handler method will ensure that the communication utterance is sent to all connected clients In this method other enhancements can be added such as whisper functionality where an utterance is sent to one specified client instead of all clients or logging where the utterance is saved into a transcript of all communication within the room The handler method can be seen in Figure A 7 APPENDIX A THE TINY THYMER 188 designated constructor public ChatRoom ThId thid Collection args super thid args Figure A 8 Designated chat room constru
170. nderstanding how the application is used by a community As the task and community is understood the application can be adapted to better fit the task and therefore improve the quality of the collaboration Distributed collaboration is becoming more and more key to running an effective business It is the hope that this work can start to improve the state of the art of building these groupware applications and help the practice move towards deploying better applications that enhance the collaborative activity Bibliography AFILO1 AFLIO1 ALFI98 Ame03 ant AS98 Bec99 BM90 Boe88 Bro95 BSSS01 Richard Alterman Alexander Feinman Joshua Introne and Seth Lands man Coordinating representations in computer mediated joint activities In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society 2001 Richard Alterman Alexander Feinman Seth Landsman and Joshua In trone Coordination of talk Coordination of action Technical Report TR 02 217 Brandeis University 2001 Richard Alterman Seth Landsman Alexander Feinman and Joshua In trone Groupware for planning Technical Report Technical Report CS 98 200 Computer Science Department Brandeis University 1998 America Online Inc AOL instant messenger 2003 http aim com Ant build tool http jakarta apache org ant Yair Amir and Jonathan Stanton The spread wide area group com munication system Technical Repor
171. ng_view asBloc ensureReady rce registerThId incoming_view asBloc getThId ViewRIF outgoing view getOutgoingChatView outgoing_view asBloc ensureReady rc registerThId outgoing _view asBloc getThId chat_panel add incoming_view getComponent BorderLayout CENTER chat_panel add outgoing_view getComponent BorderLayout SOUTH return chat_panel protected JComponent make_bottom_panel JPanel bottom getSwingWidgetFactory createPanel bottom setLayout new BorderLayout APPENDIX B SOURCE CODE TO THE ORA APPLICATION 201 bToggle new JToggleButton Toggle drawing bToggle addActionListener this ViewRIF room_access_view getRoomAccessView room_access_view asBloc ensureReady ViewRIF palette_view getPaletteView palette_view asBloc ensureReady bottom add palette_view getComponent BorderLayout NORTH bottom add room_access_view getComponent BorderLayout CENTER bottom add bToggle BorderLayout SOUTH return bottom protected ViewRIF getIncomingChatView return ViewRIF getBlocManager getBloc incoming chat view getThId getInstanceId protected ViewRIF getOutgoingChatView return ViewRIF getBlocManager getBloc outgoing chat view getThId getInstanceId protected SwingWidgetFactoryCIF getSwingWidgetFactory return GroupwareManagerAB getExistingManager getSwingWidgetFactory
172. ngs of the IEEE Workshop on En abling Technologies Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises pages 104 109 2000 Glenford J Myers Corey Sandler Tom Badgett and Todd M Thomas The Art of Software Testing John Wiley and Sons second edition 2004 John D Musa A theory of software reliability and its application IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering SE 1 3 312 327 Septem ber 1975 JavaNCSS a source measurement suite for java 2003 http www kclee com clemens java javancss O Nierstrasz S Gibbs and D Tsichritzis Component oriented software development Communications of the ACM 35 9 160 165 1992 Alan S Neal and Roger M Simons Playback A method for evaluating the usability of software and its documentation In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems pages 78 82 1983 U S Government General Accounting Office Stronger management practices are needed to improve DOD s software intensive weapon ac quisitions http www gao gov new items d04393 pdf J Oikarinen and D Reed Internet relay chat protocol RFC 1459 May 1993 http www irchelp org irchelp rfc rfc html Elin Ronby Pedersen Kim McCall Thomas P Moran and Frank G Ha lasz Tivoli an electronic whiteboard for informal workgroup meetings In CHI 98 Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems pages 391 398 New York NY USA 1993 ACM Press Microsoft
173. nguage e Some understanding of the Extensible Markup Language XML e Familiarity with the THYME framework 206 APPENDIX C THE THYME WIDGET TUTORIAL 207 e Knowledge of object oriented concepts such as encapsulation inheritance ab stract classes and interfaces The reader is expected to have familiarity with extending and implementing classes from the JAVA programming framework This tutorial does not provide information or instructions on how to set up the THYME development framework It is recommended that you obtain instructions on how to do so before proceeding with this document This document assumes that you have a version of the THYME framework installed All code is available in the widget test project which is available from the THYME CVS repository C 3 Introduction To The Tutorial Creating a widget for the THYME framework entails taking a Java Swing Widget and making it shared i e sharing its functionality as well as the data that each widget maintains A shared widget is a set of Java classes having an object with a graphical representation that can interact with the user and objects that interact with the user interface object and the rest of the THYME framework Currently widgets are designed for use a room based groupware application In a room based application all communication from each client is brokered by a THYME application called a room Each client registers with a room and receives all traffic that i
174. noted by a dark green World View When in Info Mode clicking the World View will not make plans it will only give APPENDIX D VESSELWORLD USER MANUAL Planning B Info z wait E Marker Crane Tug lt gt Small Barge Barge C Waste Trace Dot a Marker Figure D 14 The legend window information D 2 7 Legend 230 Clicking on the Legend button opens up the Legend Window Figure D 14 This window shows the meaning of the various symbols present throughout VesselWorld D 2 8 Scoring Clicking on the Score button brings up the Score window Figure D 15 which keeps track of the group score for the current mission The system keeps track of score to provide feedback about the efficiency of the solution A high score is achieved in VesselWorld by moving all waste barrels in the harbor to the deck of the Large Barge as quickly and efficiently as possible Points are scored by loading barrels onto the large barge Points are lost for each spot of toxic spill in the harbor Points can also be lost by making mistakes such as APPENDIX D VESSELWORLD USER MANUAL 231 Start time Sun Spr 30 16 51 19 EDT 2000 Current time Sun Apr 30 19 0457 EDT 2000 Round 0 Group Score 0 Figure D 15 The score window dropping waste taking too long and not removing all waste from the harbor before declaring the task completed Score is updated after each step Do not be overly concerned about an e
175. nt Response Message This message is sent to return information requested via request message It can be used to verify success of an operation i e a successful transaction or return requested information Info Message This message is a type of action message used to inform a com ponent of a change in other components or in the application e Id Specializations ThlId The Thld is the component reference that you will use the most to ref erence components When you want to pass around a reference to a com ponent you use the ThlId instead of passing around the component itself APPENDIX A THE TINY THYMER 174 ThURL the ThURL is a URL form of a ThId When the user needs to enter a component reference or is given a list of components to choose from she is given a ThURL ThUD The THYME Universal Descriptor is an incomplete specification of a component which is used to discover a specific component or sets of components A 2 2 Infrastructure The THYME framework provides an extensive set of infrastructure to help you build your groupware applications By using these infrastructure services the developer will be able to concentrate on writing her components instead of working on the mundane aspects of networking transcription etc The infrastructure components that you will interact with are listed below NodeManager The Node Manager provides a way to access Node specific resources This service provides easy access
176. nt is vulnerable to involves the size and shape of the whiteboard dimensions If one user has a much larger display than another then some artifacts may be drawn off screen of the other user CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 83 Shared Browser The shared web browser presents an interface for collaboratively viewing and inter acting with web pages The displayed web page is a strict WYSIWIS component allowing all users to see the same web page Interaction with the web page and his tory of visited pages is shared across clients so clicking on a link on the web page choosing a previously visited page or entering a new URL causes all clients to go to the selected web page Often the web browser component is embedded within a shared scroll pane or co present scroll pane The basic shared browser component collection can be seen in Figure 3 11 BACK FORWARD STOP HOME http group cs brandeis edu group GROUP Group for Research on Useability and Pragmatics Graduate Students Seth Landsman Alex Feinman Josh Introne John Langton Michael R Head Svetlena Taneva Undergraduate Students None currently Past Graduate Students Dr Andrew Garland Tamitha Carpenter Roy Zito Wolf C Quit p C User List Chooser Figure 3 11 The shared browser This component collection provides three visual components the shared browser a URL entry field and a toolba
177. ntimes runtime parameters are specified via name value constructs on the command line In this case the parameter tcc init classid is set to the value of chat room These parameters are accessible via the ParameterManager service Finally the blocs section specifies the mapping between classid and class which is set a the beginning of the application runtime It is possible for the meaning of APPENDIX A THE TINY THYMER 177 for example the chat room to change during the application s life time This allows those changes to occur trivially between similar components Initializer The initializer component is the first developer defined component that is constructed and used by the application Once the Node infrastructure is made available the ini tializer component is constructed initialized and readied via lifecycle transitions Generally when a the initializer is readied it will construct the other application components and start the application processing For example the DefaultRoomInit initializer component will start the component identified by tcc init classid class iden tifier A 2 4 Lifecycle Each component has an available lifecycle which provides a set of post constructors that components can use to perform activities during their life time The following lifecycle stages are available LIFECYCLE_CONSTRUCTED This stage means that the component has been instantiated but has not initialized It should n
178. of how messages are sent throughout a running message passing application By doing so the developer can CHAPTER 8 SUMMARY AND FUTURE WORK 161 see whether or not messages are being sent to the proper components whether or not components are responding to messages as expected and whether or not components are sending the messages how and when the developer expected The TICK secondary application will be generated from a basis application wrap ping each component and each router in an instrumented harness This approach ensures that the basis application s functionality is preserved while the new compo nents of the introspection application receive notice as messages are sent and received in a separate set of components These separate introspection components show the paths of how messages propagate through the system To allow for further testing an injection component is created that can formulate new messages and send them into the existing application Based on the medical metaphor of injecting dye into the blood stream the message dye can be visual ized The types of messages can be the same as those created normally by components through querying the existing components for their production sets or extend ex isting messages so that the message also reports back to a central object as it is manipulated Other Possible Utility Applications Besides this proposed application there are a number of related applications
179. office powerpoint http office microsoft com en us default aspx BIBLIOGRAPHY 168 PS94 PW91 RDC 03 RG92 SA SBF 87 SCFP00 SHC99 Shn98 sma SSJ74 SSKM9 Atul Prakash and Hyong Sop Shim Distview Support for building ef ficient collaborative applications using replicated objects Proceedings of Computer Supported Collaborative Work 1994 Lewis J Pinson and Richard S Wiener Objective C Object Oriented Programming Techniques Addison Wesley Pub Co 1991 Michiel Ronsse Koen De Bosschere Mark Christiaens Jacques Chassin de Kergommeaux and Dieter Kranzlmiiller Record replay for nondeter ministic program executions Communications of the ACM 46 9 62 67 2003 Mark Roseman and Saul Greenberg Groupkit A groupware toolkit for building real time conferencing applications In Proceedings of CSCW 92 1992 P Saint Andre Rfc 3920 extensible messaging and presence protocol xmpp Core http www ietf org rfc rfc3920 txt M Stefik D G Bobrow G Foster S Lanning and D Tatar Wysiwis revisited Early experiences with multiuser interfaces ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems 5 2 147 167 1987 John Steven Pravir Chandra Bob Fleck and Andy Podgurski jRapture A capture replay tool for observation based testing In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis pages 158 167 ACM Press 2000 Oliver Stiemerling
180. oid setWidgetIdentifier WidgetIdentifier _wid wid _wid F public WidgetIdentifier getWidgetIdentifier return wid public void receive MessageIF msg ThId src if msg instanceof SharedTreeActionMessage SharedTreeActionMessage stmsg SharedTreeActionMessage msg if stmsg getWidgetIdentifier equals getWidgetIdentifier if stmsg getAction equals SharedTreeActionType ADD_NODE f do add node functions public void sendToRoom MessageIF msg RoomClientManagerAB getExistingManager getRoomClient sendToRoom msg F Figure C 7 Partial implementation of SharedTreeModel MessageIF message new SharedTreeActionCarb SharedTreeActionType ADD_NODE getWidgetIdentifier node sendToRoom message Figure C 8 Example tree operation APPENDIX C THE THYME WIDGET TUTORIAL 215 C 5 4 The Client Init Class The final class to build is the THYME initializer class The initializer class will create the JTree view associate the SharedTreeModel with it and start the system processing The initializer has a callback method called onComplete that is called when the THYME system has started In the initializer to test the shared tree this method is overridden The initializer is shown in Figure C 5 4 This class is placed in the component subdirectory and in the widgettest component package This class ex tends the RoomClientInitAB abstract class allowing the super class to h
181. om a similar perspective to the users who generated the transcript The features of the tool that enable the replay partially depend on the qualities of the transcript such as the information encoded and the completeness of this information Capabilities such as searching require certain levels of completion in the tran script The ability to search for specific types of activity also requires enough infor mation available in the transcript to identify the desired activity The combination of THYME and SAGE as discussed provide the feature set necessary to do the level of replay necessary for analysis The comparison of the THYME and SAGE solution compared with other approaches discussed in Chapter 2 is shown in Table 4 2 CHAPTER 4 OBSERVATIONAL ANALYSIS OF GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS97 Application Search Precision Annotation Aggregate Information jRapture time ul none Playback time ui none CollabLogger none yes Videotape time none THYME and SAGE Yes time ui domain yes none Table 4 2 Playback features 4 4 Supporting Online Ethnographic Analysis Us ing THYME and SAGE The combination of the THYME groupware framework and the SAGE class library provides a reference implementation of the transcription and replay capabilities that support the requirements of replay described above A SAGE replay application appears similar to the basis application it is replaying The most straightforward SAGE application in fact should
182. ommand line in the specification file and are set explicitly are all available here This service implements thyme service ParameterManagerCIF A 2 3 Component Specification The specification of a THYME component has four major purposes 1 Designating a component as an initializer 2 Specifying application wide parameters APPENDIX A THE TINY THYMER 176 lt xml version 1 0 gt lt system spec file version 2 0 gt lt include file chats component collection gt lt init class alias default room init gt lt parameters gt lt parameter name tcc init classid value chat room gt lt parameters gt lt blocs gt lt bloc id chat room class chats bloc ChatRoom gt lt blocs gt lt system gt Figure A 2 Specification of the chat room 3 Specifying the mapping of a class id to an actual component 4 Including other component specifications The specification is an XML document which has four major sections which cor respond to each of these features In Figure A 2 the specification for the chat room is shown The include section adds the specifications from the chats component collec tion The initializer is set to the class specified by alias default room init This means that it is set to the class that the classid default room init points to The parameters section allows the developer to list a let of parameters that will be globally available to the application and will not change between ru
183. ompatibility with consumer expectations is often reported to the developer in the form of defect reports constructive feedback or general reports of dissatisfaction with the application CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 5 In all of these cases the data is second hand and subjective The user may want to be helpful He may try to provide a complete and precise report including his intent in the action he was performing the context of the application when he performed his action and the way in which he thought the application failed However this information is potentially flawed colored by how he expects the application to act and react If a breakdown or system failure is technical in nature a precise automated report may be generated which may give the developer enough information to trace the user activity in sufficient detail to determine the cause However if the failure was conceptual in that the application did not behave as the user thought it should the developer only has the user supplied report to use as a basis for investigation An approach to analyzing collaboration in a more precise and objective way is to have the system produce transcripts of online activity Subsequently if neces sary these transcripts can be analyzed providing the developer with more objective and complete data The transcript provides a basis for analyzing individual and col lective user behavior in the larger context of the online collaborative activity
184. on i e produce a count of the number of domains and or user interface actions of a given type The VesselWorld platform automatically produces complete replayable transcripts All events that occur during a VesselWorld problem solving session are recorded in a transcript by the system Every mouse click every event every shared item of information is recorded within the transcript for a session Domain events such as a planning event or a chat event were also included in the transcript The VW SAGE application was built to review the decision making of each group and examine how the participants in a VesselWorld session coordinate their activities and the exchange of information The replay application enabled an analyst to review CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 12 a session of problem solving from an omniscient perspective by consolidating the individual views into a useful format for the analyst Because the data saved had an inherent structure the analyst could search through the data using any number of criteria e g he could move forward to the next communication round plan action or other such action within the system allowing for easier review of the extensive data logs Figure 1 2 shows the playback device that was built for the adapted implemen tation of the VesselWorld platform Starting in the upper left hand corner of the figure and moving clockwise the following windows of information are provided for the ana
185. on captures interface events by intercepting interaction at the device interface level Timewarp EM97 and Chimera KF92 provide a complete transcript only with respect to an enumerated set of task events They both collect a history of actions within the application by collecting the interaction with the groupware application into a transcript Chimera uses the transcript as a basis for end user programming of macros Timewarp constructs a history of changes to a data object e g a document The user can modify a historical data object and CHAPTER 2 RELATED LITERATURE 37 thereby change all of its descendants Neither Chimera or Timewarp provide replayable transcripts that could be used for ethnographic analysis Transitions or States As the transcript is generated during a session of use it can either record transitions between states or individual states The advantage of a transcript that encodes data in terms of state is that it allows the playback tool to directly access any state the disadvantage is that collecting such a transcript is spatially and computationally expensive Storing transitions result in a smaller transcript and is computationally cheaper to collect but at the cost of more expensive post processing and playback of the transcript Rewind may be costly as it may entail re running playback from the start of the transcript until it reaches the prior state that the analyst chooses to examine In addition
186. on how to setup and build a THYME application can be found in another tutorial Lan02 The code that will be added will be based in the widgettest base widgettest src widgettes directory In this directory there are three subdirectories of interest In component components will be placed In spec the specification that describes the assembly of the application is placed in this directory Finally in the message subdirectory the action type and message objects are placed Optionally if a custom UI is to be built it would be placed in the ui directory Adding new UI objects is optional and not used in this tutorial The widget that will be implemented in this tutorial is the shared JTree widget This widget is a shared version of the Java Swing JTree The tutorial will focus on building up the widget and associated classes so that they interact with the THYME framework APPENDIX C THE THYME WIDGET TUTORIAL 210 package widgettest message import gump share TypeEnumeration public class SharedTreeActionType extends TypeEnumeration public static final SharedTreeActionType ADD_NODE new SharedTreeActionType ADD_NODE public SharedTreeActionType String id super id Figure C 3 Partial implementation of SharedTreeActionType NOTE All classes you create should be saved in the package widgettest bloc If you use an IDE such as IntelliJ or Eclipse they may create a wrong package name C 5 1 The ActionType
187. onent processes each data object individually but how the data affects the component s internal state is shaped by each of these factors Definition 2 illustrates this processing Definition 2 The application of a message M on component C is and results in C This method is also written as C M The state of a component is the product of the basis component Cp and an ordered list of all messages that have been applied to the component In the previous example C M C is also written as C Mn41 Cindi The component C after the third message C M3 is actually Co M1 gt C M2 gt C Ms3 The state of a composite component is defined as the state of all of its con stituent composite components A message M applied to a composite component is distributed to all of its constituent components resulting in COM POSIT E M which is also written as C M C2 Mn Cn Mn Acceptance Any component can receive any message and a component is required to receive any message and maintain a consistent state after processing the message by interaction CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 58 rule three above Therefore if a component receives an unexpected message the state of the component after the message C will be identical to the component before receiving the message C In the case where a message will not be processed by a component because of its type it is said that the component will not acce
188. ories and files CVS CVS control files Makefile The Makefile to allow building the application via the make command abs core The THYME build system implementation abs kernel The THYME build system package specific files abs package properties Description of the package for ABS build xml The Ant build xml file to allow building the application via the ant com mand chats The THYME chat room implementation gump The THYME utilities package leaves The THYME Transcriber APPENDIX A THE TINY THYMER 183 red The THYME Registrar swab The THYME shared whiteboard implementation thyme core The core THYME libraries and component framework my project This is the skeleton THYME project where you will put your source code Updating the Source Code As we receive bug reports and implement fixes you will be required to update your source tree To perform this update change to the my project base directory and perform the following command cvs up Compilation and Test Once you have downloaded the my project base module and have properly configured your environment you should try compiling and running a sample application This will confirm whether or not everything is properly set up To build everything run the command make Assuming everything succeeded you should have a working THYME installation The next step is to attempt to run a THYME application We will try to run the THYME chat room 1 Open three terminals
189. ort this We recommend 128M of physical RAM Network THYME requires a network connection to build On first install the build will download approximately 10 megabytes of data Future builds may require a similar download and will fail if no network is available Firewall The network routing model supported by THYME requires each node to have incoming and outgoing network connections A Node which cannot accept and create foreign connections will fail Therefore firewalls are incompatible with the THYME framework and you will need to disable your firewall to develop with the THYME framework Programs The THYME framework depends on the following programs Java JDK 1 3 x jav The Java JDK that we recommend is version 1 3 1 We have tested the JDK that is distributed by Sun at http java sun com and the one that is included in MacOSX 10 2 1 A usable version of the JDK can be found in the Brandeis Computer Science Berry Patch on the Linux boxes Jikes jik We require the use of the Jikes Java Compiler Jikes is available for Linux and comes with MacOSX 10 2 1 Ant ant The Ant build tool is used extensively for compiling our source code It can be found in http jakarta apache org ant as part of the Fink ports collection for MacOSX http fink sf net CvVS cvs Our source tree is available via CVS only To obtain the source code you will be using you will need to have a CVS client available This comes by APPENDIX A THE TIN
190. ot be used in this stage This stage is entered at start up and after a component is RESET LIFECYCLE_INIT This stage means that the component has been initialized variables have been set and infrastructure is available This stage is entered via the INIT transition When entering this stage the onInit method is called Only a constructed component can be initialized LIFECYCLE_READY This stage means that the component is ready for use This stage is entered via the READY transition When entering this stage the APPENDIX A THE TINY THYMER 178 onReady method is called Only an initialized component can be made ready LIFECYCLE_SHUTDOWN This stage means that the component has reached the end of its lifecycle and can be disposed of When entering this stage the onShutdown method is called The following transitions are available LIFECYCLE_DO_INIT This transition will set a constructed component to the initialized stage LIFECYCLE_DO_READY This transition will set an initialized component to the ready stage LIFECYCLE_DO_SHUTDOWN This transition will set a component to the shutdown stage LIFECYCLE_DO_RESET This transition will reset a component to the con structed stage To transition between components THYME provides the following methods setInit This method will execute the LIFECYCLE_DO_INIT transition if the com ponent is in the constructed stage setReady This method will execute the LIFECYCLE_
191. passed to another component and is ultimately transcribed by the transcript manager A companion framework to THYME called SAGE is the foundation for construct CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 24 a Transcript Collector Transcript Manager User Web Browser Model Web Browser Manager Foreign Router Figure 1 8 The shared web browser transcription mechanism ing the replay tool It provides both the automatic generation of replay applications and the framework for building these replay tools Included in the SAGE framework is the ability to search for specific information in the transcript of user activity Unlike other examples of system replay THYME allows the analyst to search for informa tion and events in the transcript Additional searchable fields and information can be added to the transcript allowing analysts to mark points of interest as replay occurs The replay capabilities are a result of the component architecture and component tagging described in the THYME framework Because this framework is component oriented and components are clearly tagged a replay application can be constructed without extensive developer investment The transcript that is collected as part of the basis application provides the input to the replay application A developer may conclude that the application needs to be modified after viewing and analyzing a replay session Ethnographic analysis is most beneficial
192. plication s use is denoted by t 0 00 A component property is always valid if it holds for every possible message that can be applied to it A component property is impossible if and only if it will not occur in any CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 60 possible timeslice that is by any possible set of messages in any order Properties are applicable or impossible for a composite when the same holds true for all of their constituent components 3 1 3 Properties The component properties are consequences of the component interaction rules de scribed above They govern how the components and sets of components can be reasoned about as they exist in an application The first property is replaceability It refers to the ability of the component model to change the component being used at arbitrary times during the run time of the application as defined in Definition 3 The principle of replaceability applies to composite components equally via their constituent components Definition 3 Given two components D and E E can replace D in an application if Eaco Dace COMP REPLACABILITY D E Eaco Dace Two components are considered similar if their external interface is equivalent As a component their external interfaces are contained wholly in their production and acceptance sets This property is defined in Definition 4 Definition 4 Given two components D and E D and E are similar if Daco Eacc and
193. pplications roughly half of the teams in that class produced usable applications 6 2 Resulting Projects Each project implemented by the Fall 2002 class showcases some of the different types of applications that can be constructed using THYME This section details a subset of the implemented projects and how the framework was used to implement their CHAPTER 6 USE OF THYME IN THE CLASSROOM 126 groupware design 6 2 1 ORA The Online Research Assistant is an application that allows a more experienced researcher such as a librarian to help another researcher locate information on the World Wide Web This application was built using the shared whiteboard chat room and shared browser sub applications and made use of the shared scrollpane widget The shared whiteboard was modified to be used as a glass pane on top of the browser The browser and glass pane were put inside of a shared scrollpane The chat room was modified to color the text similar to how the shared whiteboard text was colored and show emoticons in the incoming chat view No new messages were added All these changes were cosmetic altering properties of the components but not altering their interaction An example of this application in use can be seen in Figure 6 2 In this example interaction two users are collaboratively working to find a specific reference using the ORA tool Through the use of the overlaid shared whiteboard the collaborator who found the a
194. ppropriate reference can direct the other participant to it The ORA client application is defined by the set INCOMING CHAT VIEW OUTGOING CHAT VIEW CHAT MODEL SHARED W HITEBOARD COMPONENT COLLECTION SHARED BROWSER COMPONENT COLLECTION Where the INCOMING CHAT VIEW is a modified version of the original INCOMING CHAT VIEW that supports user defined colors and emoticons CHAPTER 6 USE OF THYME IN THE CLASSROOM 127 STS 39S JUNC TITS BOCSS B W BOCAN A Spirar moar OT sonw T ob hi development and enhancement IEEE bob l m trying to find a paper on the spiral model of software engineering liege ics uci edu pub ziv rehus pap pips fred try citeseer com bob know about the boehm paper l m looking for more recent work fred how about this one bob that looks right l Il start there A primary difficulty in applying the spiral model has been the lack of exp BACK FORWARD STOP HOME saa http citeseer nj nec com cs E Quit 6 Client List Y Chooser Sab Ae tem ci A i d aa auie 4 8 68 quit J Client List d Chooser ey nen eee Sammi Figure 6 2 Screenshot of the online research assistant 6 2 2 SALSA The Supplementary Academic Learning System Alpha application provides a way for an instructor to lecture to geographically distributed students and for those stu dents to interact with the instructor SALSA added two related concepts to the THYME f
195. pt the message type The set of message types that a given component will accept is its acceptance set represented by Ccc The acceptance set of a composite com ponent COM POSIT Eacc is the union of the acceptance sets of its constituent components defined in the Equation 3 1 Production Messages are produced by components during their run time A message occurs in response to processing other messages or though external input i e user interface events or a timer The list of all message types that a component will produce is its production set represented by Cprop Similar to the acceptance set of a composite component the production set of a composite component COM POSIT Eprop is the production set of its constituent components shown in Equation 3 2 COM POSIT Eprop Ue C E COMPOSITE Cprop 3 2 Time Some properties of a component identifier composite and application may change during the run time of an application Such changes happen in a number of ways e g a tailoring action that replaces an identifier s component reference or the recon figuration of a component Because of the possibility of these changes the concept CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 59 of time must be taken into consideration for describing the properties of component interaction Since all changes within the framework and application should occur through messages the entire run time of an application is represented by the ti
196. r containing a forward and backward button to interact with the URL history A shared browser instance is defined by the set BROW SER VIEW ENTRY VIEW TOOLBAR VIEW HISTORY MODEL BROWSER MODEL CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 84 This component collection also defines a new message the SharedBrowserMessage It is shown in Definition 26 Definition 26 SharedBrowser Message URLgNTRY BROWSER ACTION Where BROW SER ACTION is chosen from the set NEW URL HISTORY URL The shared browser is vulnerable to two major sets of externalities First if two users have different size displays the amount of information shown and perhaps the layout of that information will be altered Second the current shared web browser passes URLs not the web page contents If one user has certain login information or cookies associated with the web page the specific information presented to each user may be different Shared Editor The shared editor provides an interface for collaborative editing of a document The document editor is a strict WYSIWIS component allowing all viewers to see the same document with the same information Edits to the document are immediately applied to all user s documents Like the shared browser the editor can be embedded into a co present or shared scroll pane The shared editor is shown in Figure 3 12 The shared editor component collection only includes the editor visual component This col
197. r example provides a work a like to the single user web browser in a collaborative setting Similarly the shared editor provides a work a like to a document editor 2 2 Analysis of Groupware Use Once the application is built strong analysis techniques need to be applied to the system to understand how the system is used and where the breakdowns occur The approaches discussed primarily center around online ethnographic analysis and relies on two system properties First the generation of a transcript or collection of the activity of the participants involved in the collaboration needs to be collected Second this transcript needs to somehow be replayed so that the analyst can observe the interaction with the system The ability to replay the application s use directly enables ethnographic analysis of the collaboration as mediated by the application Ethnography is the careful study of activities and the relations between activities in a complex social setting ST91 The analysis investigates the interaction of people within the collaboration environment The result of this analysis is the identification of common practices and breakdowns in the collaboration and the designation of opportunities to simplify or improve the collaboration CHAPTER 2 RELATED LITERATURE 39 Other types of system analysis also take advantage of the transcript and replay capabilities discussed in this chapter One example is found in the domain of dis
198. r fielding Software needs to change in order to accommodate different work flows different groups of users and changing business environments all of which invalidates the view of software as fixed static objects Figure 1 1 shows a Congressional General Accounting Office study which illustrates that only 2 of acquired software products are deployed in the state in which they are delivered and that this percentage is not improving despite sixteen years of progress in the field Off Consequently once a groupware application is built and deployed the application needs to be open to study and analysis Our understanding of how to build better collaborative tools is improved through understanding how collaboration occurs in the field Presented in this work is an approach to developing groupware that is tailored to its community of users The model of software development depends on an integrated software lifecycle where the observation of the application s use a first class member of the lifecycle The observation of use is accomplished primarily through ethnographic analysis ST91 of transcripts of online activity Quantitative and other qualitative measures further support the analysis CHAPTER 1 47 46 INTRODUCTION 29 29 1979 GAO Study 6 8 million 1995 GAO Study 35 7 billion 19 20 3 3 2 2 Delivered But Paid For But ae Use
199. ramework floor control EGR91 Cla96 and classes of users In SALSA there were two different classes of users the instructor and the student The instructor had complete control over the floor control of the system He could give permission for a student to speak decide who the next student to speak would be and revoke permission at any point During a typical session the instructor would lecture and a student would virtually raise his hand When the instructor was ready to accept questions or comments he would transfer control to a user of his choice Only one person could affect the chat room or shared whiteboard at a time 6 2 3 RA Scheduler The RA Scheduler is a groupware application to facilitate the scheduling of Resident Assistant office hours at a university The RA Scheduler team used the chat room CHAPTER 6 USE OF THYME IN THE CLASSROOM 128 INOTIFICATION firaz INOTIFICATION kevin OTIFICATION ben has ti no INOTIFICATION natalie hal INOTIFICATION firaz has INOTIFICATION kevin has taken Au Figure 6 3 Screenshot of the RA scheduler in implementing their own shared scheduling calendar by implementing a series of canned messages listened for by their chat client component When those messages were received the chat client would parse them and pass them to another component a technique we refer to later as hijacking
200. rd components with floor control capabilities added by the developers The combination of components shown in Figure 7 8 were used as the CHAPTER 7 THE LIFECYCLE REVISITED 150 Cova Cune 3 lt U Fy SELECT CLEAR_ALL CLEAR_LOCAL DELETE seth two people will come from the right and provide defensive cover User List Figure 7 7 The counterstrike application basis of the new application The agreed upon design for the Workforce application is shown in Figure 7 9 The design called for a new Canvas View that supported the task Due to how the task was to work there had to be two palettes one contains a selection of drawing tools and the other contains the selection of available people to be scheduled The application design also called for a panic button which is used to draw the other participant s attention to an ongoing event 7 3 2 Construction of the Workforce Application The construction of the application focused on improving the shared whiteboard capabilities and implementing the panic button functionality which was implemented CHAPTER 7 THE LIFECYCLE REVISITED 151 Canvas View Palette View Incoming Chat View Outgoing Chat View Figure 7 8 Layout of the component views in the counterstrike application as the first version of the Shared Button widget Its effect was to launch a simple dialog window on all other participant s screens The
201. re designed to have well defined and limited inter action with other components Acceptable performance was achieved by allowing interaction outside of the sanctioned system which was very difficult to reproduce in the replay application Modification of VesselWorld required a good deal of developer familiarity of how component interaction vis a vis messages occurs within the application For a new message type to be added several components needed to be changed so that the CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 20 GComponents Planning View State of 2 Interface State of System State of Data World Chat Planning Model Mode Mode GModels Figure 1 6 GComponent and GModel interaction CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 21 message could be routed processed and delivered to the appropriate consuming components In all building replay into VesselWorld took several months and required a rela tively static system It became clear that it must both be cheaper to build the replay system and to collect system transcripts if analysis is to become a part of the devel opment cycle It must also be possible to integrate these tools into the continuous development cycle as they cannot be a one time major expense This thesis discusses the continuous development lifecycle Technology and techniques that support the lifecycle and practical use of the lifecycle ar
202. re pre processed to eliminate spurious messages and reduce their size Pre processing was shown to not impact the fidelity of the data as it removed generated events messages that were fired as side effects of user triggered messages By removing these messages access time was greatly reduced Analysis was performed by Sara McComb and her graduate students This team CHAPTER 7 THE LIFECYCLE REVISITED 154 used online ethnographic analysis exclusively to analyze the participant data From the use of SAGE they drew conclusions as to how the application was used how the team interacted and where the team collaboration broke down 7 3 4 Conclusions This chapter detailed the integrated lifecycle that enables analysis to be a key part of the development of a groupware application The integrated lifecycle uses the evolutionary model of development a practice that has been shown to have benefits in building complex applications Bec99 Coc01 By using analysis as a first class phase in a spiral model of development the risk analysis and requirements phases can be more directed and more precisely modify the groupware application to support its community of users As demonstrated by the case study and elsewhere AFLIO1 AFILO1 AFLIO1 FA03 TAGT03 the integrated lifecycle can have a significant impact on practition ers in education and research By always having access to the analysis capability and being able to rapidly field succes
203. re similar as per Definition 4 but not the same as the basis application models These models as described below are proxied for by generated SAGE model components that enable forward and backwards playback of the application s activity 4 2 Example Analysis with ORA We performed data collection and analyses on usage of the initial design of the ORA application The analysis is used to direct the further development of the application CHAPTER 4 OBSERVATIONAL ANALYSIS OF GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS92 lt lt lt o gt gt gt timestamp 1059015205598 position 11 20 Last Event swabv2 carb SWBArtifactActionCarb Event type No Event Filter gt Brandeis University NOTIFICATION thas joined gt Department of Computer Science MSO18 NOTIFICATION s has joined gt 415 South St s hi there gt Waltham MA 02474 1 781 736 2712 gt mailto seth cs brandeis edu h on Useability Brandeis University Tech Report CS 03 234 Building Groupware On THYME Seth x Landsman and Richard Alterman submitted to CSCW 2004 pdf X BACK FORWARD STOP _ HOME Enter URL here SELECT CLEAR_ALL CLEAR_LOCAL DELETE C Quit JE User List Figure 4 1 The SAGE replay application for the online research application allowing conclusions to be drawn about how the application is to be used by the end user Based on these conclusions the development directions can be deter
204. red table resulting in a model that acts as a shared table with only one column This widget uses the SharedListActionMessage shown in Definition 22 CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS TT Definition 22 The SharedListActionMessage is defined as SharedListActionMessage WIDGET IDENTIFIER WIDGET GROUP SHARED LIST ACTION LIST CELL Where SHARED LIST ACTION is chosen from the set ADD CELL REMOVE CELL REPLACE CELL The shared list has a production SharedListy oq set of SharedListprop WidgetGrouping Request Message W idgetGrouping Response Message SharedList ActionMessage The acceptance set SharedList is the same 3 2 2 Groupware Components In order to rapidly develop groupware it is necessary to have a rich library of group ware capabilities These components provide common types of interaction found in groupware applications such as the chat room shared surfaces and shared web browsers The component collections that are presented in this section can be em bedded into a larger application as illustrated in the next section Each component set is largely self contained being mostly orthogonal to other component collections These component collections unlike widgets may contain several view compo nents that can be placed and displayed as separate units in the application For example the chat room component collection contains an incoming and outgoing chat view These views can be placed a
205. rk Chapter 6 and 7 show how THYME and SAGE have been used The use of THYME in the classroom shows the reduced development time that these techniques support The use of a classroom built application for use in another research labora tory testifies to the quality of the applications built using THYME 8 1 Future Work The techniques and their reference implementations in the THYME and SAGE frameworks are mature and have seen extensive use within a number of projects Ideally the adoption of these techniques can be increased and the frameworks can continue to mature There are a number of areas of future work that should be pursued to ensure that these techniques have wider appeal CHAPTER 8 SUMMARY AND FUTURE WORK 159 8 1 1 More Shared Widgets Groupware Components and Capabilities THYME currently contains component sets for the more common groupware tools that are found in the literature These include a whiteboard chat room shared editor and shared browser THYME also contains a framework for sharing user interface widgets and a handful of some of the more common shared widgets such as the shared text field shared scroll pane shared list shared tree shared table and shared button While it would not be reasonable to support or anticipate every possible groupware component or widget some obvious candidates can be identified The two major groupware components are the ones seen in groupware applications that promote informa
206. roductivity In his book Designing the User Interface Shn98 Shneiderman says Goal directed people quickly recognized the benefits of electronic coop eration and potential to live in the immediacy of the networked global village The distance to colleagues is measured not in miles but rather in intellectual compatibility and responsiveness a close friend is someone who responds from 3000 miles away within three minutes at three A M with the reference you need to finish a paper Corporate employees do not work in an eight hour a day configuration Players in the global economy exist in all time zones and they must make business decisions CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 2 correctly and quickly no matter the hour Collaborative applications can enable organization wide work to continue after traditional working hours Beyond the need to be competitive collaboration also improves overall produc tivity An agile corporation succeeds through the intelligent use of its personnel by leveraging each worker s abilities and knowledge Coordination between employees is necessary in order to share and support the tasks required by the organization These software applications that mediate the distributed work of a community of users as they work towards a common goal are collectively called groupware EGR91 All software especially groupware applications are not fixed entities They evolve and change constantly both during development and afte
207. s Name this new class SharedTreeActionMessage and place it in the message sub directory Its package should be widgettest message The class should have acces sors to get any payload you want the message to carry Its constructor should take the ActionType a widget identifier described later and any payload The initial message is shown in Figure C 4 C 5 3 The Model The model class for the widget contains the shared data structured and the function ality to manipulate that data In the case of the tree model this model is directly manipulated by the JTree view The class to create is SharedTreeModel placed in the component subdirectory with a package of widgettest component This class should extend the THYME abstract model component thyme component ModelAB This class will also imple APPENDIX C THE THYME WIDGET TUTORIAL 212 package widgettest component import java util Collection import javax swing tree TreeModel import thyme component ModelAB import thyme id ThId public class SharedTreeModel extends ModelAB implements TreeModel public SharedTreeModel ThId thid Collection args super thid args Figure C 5 Partial implementation of SharedTreeModel ment the javax swing tree TreeModel interface This tutorial will not cover the TreeModel methods that the model needs to implement that is left as an exercise to the reader The basic model is shown in Figure C 5 3 Once this class skeleton i
208. s affects how the analyst can interact and use the transcript and include Search What kinds of events the analyst can use the playback tool to search for depends on what kinds of events are in the transcript For example a transcript that only encodes mouse clicks and key presses will not provide the basis for the analyst to use the playback tool to search for planning events Annotation Annotations give the analyst the ability to annotate tag or otherwise mark the transcript as the application session is replayed In addition to pro viding information for an analyst to refer to in later analysis sessions they also provide additional information for the playback tool to search for and notes for other analysts use The video tape solution provided by Suchman and Trigg ST91 provides the means for annotating a video tape transcript during playback allowing areas of interest to be clearly marked for future reference Precision After the transcript is generated the analyst can always annotate the transcript noting events of particular interest that can later be returned to for CHAPTER 2 RELATED LITERATURE 39 further analysis Annotation is a time consuming and potentially inaccurate task for the analyst Ideally the analyst can replay an unannotated transcript stopping at for example each chat event Precision is used to indicate that a transcript is sufficiently encoded with information such that the replay applica tion
209. s in place the methods and variables that enable to class to interoperate with the other shared trees needs to be added The first variable to add is the widget identifier The widget identifier provides two functions it identifies what type of shared widget this model is associated with and what grouping of these widgets this model is associated with All shared trees for example will have the same widget type and all shared tree that have the same grouping type will show changes from each other Two shared trees with different grouping types will not show changes from each other however The widget identifier will be assigned to the model All SharedTreeActionMessages that this compo nent sends will be constructed with the assigned widget identifier Once the widget identifier is added the class looks like Figure C 5 3 The next set of methods to be added allows the model to receive and process methods from other widgets and to send messages to other widgets in the same widget group Whenever a message comes in the component s receive method is APPENDIX C THE THYME WIDGET TUTORIAL 213 package widgettest component import java util Collection import javax swing tree TreeModel import thyme component ModelAB import thyme id ThId import t4g share WidgetIdentifier public class SharedTreeModel extends ModelAB implements TreeModel protected WidgetIdentifier wid public SharedTreeModel ThId thid Collection args s
210. s represented as APPLICATION R C1 C2 CN where R is the room application and C through Cy are parts of the client applica tions Each client communicates to the room and the room communicates to each client A room based application defines one message type in addition to the standard THYME messages This message the RoomRegistrationMessage is shown Defini tion 23 A client sends the RoomRegistrationMessage to the room upon registering and unregistering from the room The room rebroadcasts the RoomRegistrationMes sage to currently registered clients Definition 23 The RoomRegistrationMessage is defined as RoomRegistrationMessage CLIENT DATA REGISTRATION ACTION REGISTRATION ACTION is chosen from a set REGISTER CLIENT UNREGISTER CLIENT CLIENT HAS REGISTERED CLIENT HAS UNREGISTERED Each room based application defines their own set of messages to communicate between clients The room component is implemented or parameterized to respond to those messages and selectively pass them to clients WYSIWIS groupware that is not replicated exactly is susceptible to externalities BSSS01 An externality arises when the information or presentation accessible to one party in a collaboration is different than that of another party The THYME groupware components presented here do not explicitly address externalities in their development but potential externalities are discussed in the component descriptions below CHA
211. s sent through the room In this setup each widget communicates with the rest of the system through the room client When communication comes into the client appropriate messages are passed to the widget s THYME component Figure C 1 shows two applications connected to a room APPENDIX C THE THYME WIDGET TUTORIAL Room Client Figure C 1 Room based communication C 4 Overview of a Widget A THYME widget typically consists of the following classes e widgetnameView e widgetnameModel e widgetnameMessage e widgetnameActionType 208 The view class presents the information contained in the model class to the user The model uses the message class to communicate to other models The message contains an action type which describes the type of action to take on the model The model and view are intentionally disconnected allowing replacement of the view by developers when customization is necessary The breakdown of these classes is shown in Figure C 2 APPENDIX C THE THYME WIDGET TUTORIAL 209 widgetnameView Java Swing Widget Figure C 2 Widget class inheritance C 5 Implementing a Widget All code that is to be implemented in this tutorial will be written in the THYME widgettest base module The first step is to obtain this module and attempt to compile it Instructions
212. s timestamp are retrieved and applied This process is shown in Definition 28 Definition 28 Given a component wrapper CW that wraps a component type C upon receiving message M which is position I in transcript T the following takes place 1 if there is a milestone MI in CW that corresponds to Cr activate that mile stone and exit 2 if there is no such milestone find the milestone MI that has the closest index less than I 3 copy MI to a new component Cr r 4 apply every message Mx where X gt J gt I to Cr r 5 activate Cray 6 if a new milestone is desired at I store Cp I into a milestone MIr The decision to store milestones depends on the application and storage needs The milestone process is related to checkpointing Lor77 a database to ensure con sistency of the database state Milestones may unlike checkpoints change in number and temporal location during execution Global system snapshots CL85 YM92 a technique used in distributed debugging is also similar in that it looks to collect a CHAPTER 4 OBSERVATIONAL ANALYSIS OF GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS104 consistent state across multiple systems The milestones described here are not used to create a unified system state although they do that as a consequence because of the simple nature of the SAGE application Instead milestones are designed to provide an accessor for a set of temporal positions within a single model A component can implement its
213. s to how the system failed and made it possible for them to determine the precise points of failure SSKM92 Applying the analysis techniques to the structured development lifecycle of the groupware application enables the adaptation of the application based on analysis of its use Taken apart these techniques have a good deal of utility and enhance the ability to successfully construct analyze and rebuild groupware applications However taken together they afford an integrated lifecycle for building complex analyzable and tailored groupware applications This chapter discusses this integrated lifecycle a methodology for taking the previously discussed techniques and technologies and producing a way to rigorously build suitable groupware applications The next section tours the notion of the software lifecycle comparing the various techniques that are in use and showing where the integrated lifecycle conceptually builds on how software is currently constructed A case study of how the integrated lifecycle has been used is then shown This chapter concludes with a discussion of the benefits of this lifecycle 7 1 Software Lifecycles Software development lifecycles are processes that exist to help manage the develop ment of a software application They provide a pre determined set of steps that are executed in order and should result in a complete well defined and good software application By structuring the steps of the activity
214. searcher in his task Studies at Brandeis University HAL04 have also shown how collaboration in the classroom can benefit from improved building and analysis techniques Educational groupware is used to study cooperative learning task understanding and how col laboration provides improvement in the learning task In the Computer Supported Cooperative Learning CSCL field the educator is interested in determining how collaboration and a software system support the learning task Ethnographic analy sis aids in the study of how students perform and interact vis a vis the collaborative application Observation of the application s use also aids the system design aspect of devel opment When using evolutionary software development techniques applications are developed in cycles After each cycle developers must analyze the gap between the current state of the application and its future stage of completion In groupware applications many of the iterations of development may be spent on perfecting the application s collaborative capabilities and task environment Much of this work is done by informally observing the user s activities The more complete the analysis techniques the more the accuracy of the development model improves The increase in accuracy may in turn lead to the reduction of development iterations and increase the improvements in the design made between iterations Chapter 8 Summary and Future Work The work discus
215. sed in this dissertation describes the integrated lifecycle and the technologies and techniques that are required to support the lifecycle s practice The lifecycle revolves around the contention that groupware applications are best built in an evolutionary context As they are built decisions are made based on information that is received as user feedback bug reports and other often subjective communica tions by the user As the application is developed if additional forms of information such as online ethnographic analysis that are more accurate and objective could be applied to the decision making process of the developers the probability of success of the application increases To support the lifecycle two technologies have been developed The first is the set of techniques implemented in the THYME framework for the rapid construction and rebuilding of analyzable groupware applications The second is the capability to perform the over the shoulder analysis on the collected transcripts of groupware applications without having to build a new application to do so a capability that is realized in the SAGE framework The first supporting technology the rapid construction of groupware applications 156 CHAPTER 8 SUMMARY AND FUTURE WORK 157 has three essential characteristics First it must support existing groupware conven tions and affordances In the literature and increasingly in common use there are a number of ways that
216. signated as listeners for certain types of event objects and have a callback method implemented to receive those events Events in VesselWorld all descend from a specific event object called the ZEvent which contains information such as the identification of the user and component that CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 18 Subsystem Component Subsystem Component Subsystem Component Subsystem Subsystem Subsystem Component State Component State of System Figure 1 5 The subsystem model generated the event the timestamp and the target Events may be targeted to a component within the client or to the server When an event is targeted to the server it is passed to the State Of Network subsystem In this subsystem an event is serialized and sent to the server for processing Similarly the State Of Network component can receive a message from the server deserialize it and send it into the rest of the client Transcription of events within the client application occurs through the State Of Logging subsystem As events flowed through the VesselWorld application copies of every event were sent to the State Of Logging component Events were then serialized to disk building the session transcript VesselWorld also presents two component hierarchies for its model view controller user interface layout Visual components within VesselWorld depend on the GCom ponent and GModel hierarchies The components that extend
217. sive prototypes of groupware applications they may be able to more quickly and effectively study the use of the application A researcher who wishes to theorize what additional communication capabilities a collaborative system requires may for example find significant leverage from the tools and methodology provided here In this scenario analysis is used to understand the online practice grounded in the communication components provided by the col laborative application Transcripts capture this practice and put it in a form that can be interpreted by the replay application which is used to observe this practice in the context of the provided communication components and task environment The researcher will draw conclusions as to where the weak spots are in the provided sys tem High amounts of coordination work or heavy cognitive loads could be warning CHAPTER 7 THE LIFECYCLE REVISITED 155 signs that the application needs to be augmented to off load some of this work The researcher will determine what changes are needed to improve the online exchange and management of information by proposing new communication methods These new aspects of the system will help distribute the information and workload among the users and between the users and the system Another iteration of the lifecycle can be used to fine tune these representations and validate their utility Work at Brandeis University showed how this method of analysis benefited the re
218. sks For example JUnit jun provides a framework and set of utilities to do unit testing of Java classes UML diagrams Fow03 provide structural representations of an object oriented application and embedded application documentation shows meaning and intention behind the source code itself These tools allow developers to measure describe and visualize properties of the software system When looking at groupware applications visualizing and testing the use of the ap plication becomes as important as visualizing and testing the structure and individual units of the application Suchman and Trigg ST91 showed the need for being able to collect information about the activity surrounding a collaborative artifact during its use so that it could be analyzed after the collaboration was completed To address this need they built a customized tool for doing ethnographic analysis of the artifact and annotating its passage and transformation through the task environment We 89 CHAPTER 4 OBSERVATIONAL ANALYSIS OF GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS90 have shown that being able to perform online ethnographic analysis of an application gives a valuable vector of information allowing redesigns of the artifact to be done efficiently and correctly LA02 In this same paper the utility of a custom analysis application was demonstrated contrasted to analysis limited to an exact copy of the system such as in the jRapture SCFP00 system As the complexity of the
219. ssembly of the ORA application is shown in Figure 3 14 While the com posite ORA component collection has a production and acceptance set containing the messages from the chat room shared whiteboard and shared browser each com ponent collection that makes up the ORA application are mostly orthogonal with each other They in fact overlap only on the room registration message The room CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 87 registration message is passed between the room client components and not other members of the application s collection of components In building the application a single room client is used connecting the existing components to the room through a single point This minor modification means that the component collections that make up the ORA application are orthogonal and can work together reasonably safely and have a defined dependency graph through any other common components Whiteboard Browser Component Component Collection Collection g Composite Application Chat Component Collection Figure 3 14 The assembled composite application CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 88 3 4 Conclusions This chapter presented the features and formalized model of a software foundation for building groupware applications in the integrated lifecycle model of development This model is realized in a reference implementation presented as the THYME dis tributed component framework This fr
220. t 98 4 Center for Networking and Distributed Systems Johns Hopkins University July 1998 Kent Beck Extreme Programming Explained Embrace Change Addison Wesley 1999 S A Bly and S L Minneman Commune a shared drawing surface In Proceedings of the conference on Office information systems pages 184 192 New York NY USA 1990 ACM Press Barry Boehm A spiral model of software development and enhancement IEEE Computer 21 5 61 72 1988 Frederick P Brooks The Mythical Man Month Essays on Software En gineering Addison Wesley 1995 James Begole Randall B Smith Craig A Struble and Clifford A Shaf fer Resource sharing for replicated synchronous groupware IEEE ACM Trans Netw 9 6 833 843 2001 163 BIBLIOGRAPHY 164 CBM90 CL85 Cla96 Coc01 cvs Deu Dis93 Eas96 EGR91 Ehr99 EM97 FA03 FLIA04 Fow03 FS86 Gar67 W H Cheung J P Black and E Manning A framework for distributed debugging IEEE Software 1990 K Mani Chandy and Leslie Lamport Distributed snapshots Determing global states of distributed systems ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 3 1 63 67 February 1985 Herbert H Clark Using Language Cambridge University Press 1996 Alistair Cockburn Agile Software Development Addison Wesley Profes sional 2001 Concurrent versioning system http cvshome org Peter Deutsch The eight fallacies of distributed
221. t Leaking please ID small one 312457 Small Net Located Not Leaking Li big 1 177 464 Large Dredge Located Not Leaking i 142441 Xlarge None Located Slow Leak sealing Delete Selected Note Unselect Everything Figure D 18 The object list window to their Name To sort the list by other columns click in the header of the desired column For example to sort by the equipment needed click in the Equipment header It is also possible to rearrange the order of the columns for convenience To help keep track of each object a yellow cross hairs and label will be drawn in the World View at the location listed for each object Note that any inaccurate information listed in the Object List will carry over to the cross hair location You may turn off the viewing of individual cross hairs by unchecking the checkbox in the cross hairs column of the appropriate object D 4 3 Strategic Planning Clicking on the Strategy button at the top of the Control Center opens up the Strate gic Planning Window Figure D 19 This area can be used to keep track of long term planning goals and to construct complex plans to organize clean up of the toxic waste APPENDIX D VESSELWORLD USER MANUAL 237 Move __ Move obi Examine Insert Mode rane2 HB SEARCH middle to bottom IE SEARCH b bottom CONTAIN LEAKING af MOVE this waste to bryti E CONTAIN waste 1 B MOVE waste 1 to bryt no oe
222. t it still used the Artifact Palette capability By retaining the capability any existing custom SAGE framework components that already use an Artifact Palette component can leverage this part of the Workforce application structure without change Roles Design patterns GHJV95 provide recurrent solutions to common development sce narios found in the design and implementation of object oriented and component oriented applications They are well known well tested and well used structures that document uses and scenarios of use Through the use of design patterns devel CHAPTER 4 OBSERVATIONAL ANALYSIS OF GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS109 opers leverage a history of use of the pattern knowing that it has been refined and that the next generation of developers will understand the code structure and the intent behind the code structure Design patterns are useful in the context of putting structure and instrumentation in the design of the application for the same reasons that they are useful for embedding knowledge within the application structure for future developers In order to explicitly embed these patterns in the application THYME provides a set of tagging interfaces called roles Roles provide a way for the developer to explicitly tag what patterns a component is involved in and what the component does within the pattern For example the most common pattern used in THYME is the Model View Controller MVC pattern also applicable to
223. t separate locations within the larger ap plication allowing more flexibility as to how the application is built and how the components are used within the larger application THYME supports a peer to peer messaging framework which can be cumber some to use in the development of groupware applications Discovering the other CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 78 clients that are intended to be in the collaborative session can be difficult and adds complexity to the developer s task for example An additional framework capability provided by THYME creates a shared syn chronization point between clients called a room The room eliminates much of the complexity associated with peer to peer applications by presenting a centralized point of contact for all clients involved in a collaboration As part of the room in frastructure a component is provided that interacts with the room and handles all communication to and from the room By reducing the coupling between components and the need to discover other clients the complexity of the application is decreased The passing of messages between clients in a room application is shown in Figure 3 9 RoomClient Model View Component Message From Room To Clients Message From Client to Room Figure 3 9 Message flow in a room application CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 79 Formally an application that uses a room i
224. terface presented story boards of its use and performed a GOMS JK96 analysis of a subset of the proposed interface The interface was also presented to sample users to get their comments and impressions During this period the class did not have access to THYME or its capabilities 28 days Prototype implementation At the beginning of this period the THYME manual Lan02 included as Appendix A initial instruction and source code was given out The THYME source code included the complete implementa tion of the THYME framework and implementations of sample applications that showed how the components could be combined into working groupware appli cations The class did not have access to the THYME framework before this period In addition to a working prototype the teams produced user documen tation for their applications During this time period three teaching assistants held approximately six hours per week of office hours which were used by some but not all teams 21 days Usability testing and redesign This task required the teams to have their user population make use of the application The teams collected transcripts of these sessions which were later analyzed to identify areas of problematic coordination This analysis led to a proposal document that described how the application could be changed to overcome collaboration problems encountered in testing Figure 6 1 Term project schedule had significantly fewer usable a
225. the dark grey bars change existing components identified by the light grey bars and a mixture of the two identified by the bars that are partially dark grey and partially light grey Each strategy entailed similar amounts of work to accomplish The CHAPTER 6 USE OF THYME IN THE CLASSROOM 133 teams that primarily changed code ORA OGRE and Counterstrike had an average difference of 2472 The teams that primarily added code SALSA RA Scheduler Dominos and Crossword had an average difference of 1667 6 3 1 Taxonomy of Changes Based on the three major strategies changing the application adding to the appli cation and a combination of the two a taxonomy of the types of changes that were made to the THYME framework can be constructed These different types of modi fications help guide where the framework affordances need to be improved and where they can be further extended The first type of modification type that was observed involved the modification of components This type of change occurred when the developer edited the source code of the provided components resulting in a component that had the same name but different properties The result is a component that has the replaceable property when compared to the original component The resulting component has additional capabilities in that it responds to messages differently or has an extended acceptance or production set The major issue with this approach is that the co
226. ther components with rea sonable assurance that they would not interact with other components and therefore the amount of integration testing could be bounded 3 1 4 Routing Messages are passed between components via message routing The routing process ensures that the correct component or set of components receive a message and are given the opportunity to apply the message to their state When a component sends a message it is addressed with a set of component identifiers This message is then passed to a service object called the message router The message router determines CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 64 how to route the message to the appropriate set of components In the non network scenario this process involves resolving the set of component identifiers into a set of component references The message is then delivered to the resulting set of com ponent references For two components to interact two service objects must exist the message router which handles the delivery of a message to a component and component repository which handles the grounding of an identifier to a component In Figure 3 6 there are two components C 4 and Cg Ca sends a Message M to Cpg To do so C4 composes the message and addresses it with the identifier Ig that refers to component Cg M is sent to the message router This service requests the component reference that Ig resolves to from the component repository which is a compon
227. tion Some of these capabilities can be determined from the application structure such as the acceptance and production sets Other information such as the use of a component as a model needs to be explicitly identified THYME provides a mecha CHAPTER 4 OBSERVATIONAL ANALYSIS OF GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS107 nism to instrument the application structure to determine how the components place within the application structure Leveraging a basis component is not always possible to do without modification How possible it is to use a component unmodified depends on several factors but is mostly indicated by its adherence to strict WYSIWIS principles as shown in Figure 4 5 As a component diverges from strict WYSIWIS it no longer has the same dis played content for every user For example the outgoing chat view is not WYSIWIS If it were needed to see every character typed in that component by every user the component would need to be reimplemented for its use within the replay application Ease of Incorporating Cannot be incorporated without reimplementing Can be incorporated without modification Cannot be incorporated without modification Strict WYSIWIS Relaxed WYSIWIS Figure 4 5 Leveraging a basis component in generation of the replay application 4 5 1 Instrumentation of THYME The replay application generation depends on being able to interpret the structure of the basis application so that its existing componen
228. tion distribution such as WebEx Web In these applications one user often controls a PowerPoint pow briefing that is displayed or otherwise used in the collaboration via a chat room or shared whiteboard by other participants A variation on this form of collaboration involves the sharing of a participant s screen with the rest of the users allowing them to share an arbitrary application In terms of shared widgets it is the goal to convert the majority of Java Swing widgets allowing rapid construction of groupware applications from existing single user applications The majority of the shared widgets have been written by students including the Shared Tree Shared Table and Shared List Appendix C shows the tutorial written for building a shared widget Additional compabalities for the THYME framework were produced by the HCI class see Chapter 6 Two examples of these capabilities are floor control and conflict resolution Floor control is implemented by introducing limits on how a component can modify data within a given model limits can be expressed for example in terms of user roles or availability of a floor control token Conflict resolution is CHAPTER 8 SUMMARY AND FUTURE WORK 160 implemented by changing the ordering of how actions are applied to a THYME model based on user roles or the type of action taken In the case of both floor control and conflict resolution how a message is applied to a component is change
229. to the two extremes of storing transitions or states a hybrid ap proach of storing checkpoints is also seen in some transcription implementations Checkpointing is the storing of occasional states of the application s execution as well as transitions between those states The resulting transcript allows for faster movement between positions in the transcript and definitive points of coordination between different parts of a distributed application Examples of this technique are found in the BugNet application JBW87 as well as Chandy and Lamport s work CL85 and others SSKM92 YM92 Table 2 1 summarizes our discussion of prior efforts at transcription in the terms of the criteria we have developed 2 2 2 Replay Online ethnographic analysis also requires the ability to replay the transcript of sys tem use Depending on how the transcript is collected different capabilities become CHAPTER 2 RELATED LITERATURE 38 Application Complete Info Type Transitions Off line jRapture UI UI transitions none Playback UI UI transitions none TimeWarp task task transitions none Videotape none N A states video Table 2 1 Transcription features available to the replay system The basic capability that should be provided is anal ogous to the replay of a video tape in that we can move forward and backwards in the timeline of the replay of the captured session Which additional capabilities the replay system implement
230. tores world view to the current status if it was displaying a future step Reset Clears all plan steps from the plan Delete Deletes the selected step from the plan This may make the remaining steps in the plan invalid Pause Adds a Pause to the plan The ship will not do anything for one step Wait Behaves just like a Pause step however it will not be removed from the plan when the plan is submitted This allows a ship to wait indefinitely NOTE Submit must be clickedeach step so that the other two captains can submit their plans Results of plan submission After all captains have submitted a plan the system will return control of the World View to the captains It is important to check whether you plan step was completed successfully A status message explaining what happened will be displayed in the Message areas in both the Control Center and in the Planning window If the plan failed the system will explain why D 4 Coordinating with other Captains D 4 1 Chat Clicking on the Chat button at the top of the Control Center opens the Chat Window Figure D 17 This allows for free form communication between captains Messages can be typed freely in the text area at the bottom of the window Clicking the Send button will send the message so it will be seen by all captains APPENDIX D VESSELWORLD USER MANUAL 235 Status Connected cranel Ok I m just going to grab this waste and go YOU But we don t know what equipm
231. ts Calm All actions are possible Light All actions are possible watch for changing weather Heavy Loading and unloading small barges requires stabilization of the barge by the tug Joint carrying is not possible Very Heavy Stabilization required No joint actions are possible Affectible range and movement speed are reduced APPENDIX D VESSELWORLD USER MANUAL 229 Click on an object to get information about it Name cranel Equipment Carried is Dredge Location 492 42 Name waste Size small Leak Rate not leaking May require special equipment to transport Clarify with the tug operator Location 471 2 Figure D 13 The information window Gale Only movement is possible at a reduced speed Winds will cause any waste carried to be dropped D 2 6 Information Window Clicking on the Info button opens up the Information window Figure D 13 This area allows closer examination of objects in VesselWorld To enter Info Mode click the Enter Info Mode button at the top of the window Once in this mode clicking on an object in the World View will provide information about that object For example clicking on barrel of waste will provide the size location and leak rate If the tug is the one requesting information it will also display what if any special equipment is needed to handle the barrel After information is collected click Leave Info Mode to resume other activities NOTE Info mode is de
232. ts can be found and reused In order to perform this task it is necessary for enough standardized structure to exist within the basis application for the application generator to use THYME provides a CHAPTER 4 OBSERVATIONAL ANALYSIS OF GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS108 number of instrumentation hooks that the developer can use to make the structure of the application and purpose of the components apparent The two major methods of identifying this information are capabilities and roles Capabilities The first type of instrumentation occurs through the use of a tagging interface called a capability This interface describes a component as having the responsibility of per forming a certain type of function within the context of the larger application Each grouping of components including widgets component collections and applications can define sets of capabilities for developers to use Capabilities represent the encapsulation of the component function Often a basis application will extend or otherwise alter components in a component set By using capabilities the intent of the component is preserved Leveraging the existing intent structure of the already known components allows already established tools to be used without change For example in the Workforce application discussed in Chapter 7 the palette component from the Shared Whiteboard application was extensively changed to allow for the separation of different artifact types ye
233. uper thid args public void setWidgetIdentifier WidgetIdentifier _wid wid _wid public WidgetIdentifier getWidgetIdentifier return wid F Figure C 6 Partial implementation of Shared TreeModel called To send a message to other widgets the sendToRoom method communicates to the room client which ensures that the message gets to the room The model will the communication methods added is shown in Figure C 5 3 The model is not capable of interacting with the other widgets The remainder of the TreeModel interface needs to be implemented When actions occur in the tree model such as adding a new node the Shared Tree ActionMessage needs to be formulated This message is formulated by the model as changes occur It is the responsibility of the author of the SharedTreeModel to im plement this functionality as changes occur and to alter the underlying set of data An example of creating a new shared tree message is shown in Figure C 5 3 This message is used as the argument to sendToRoom APPENDIX C THE THYME WIDGET TUTORIAL 214 package widgettest component import java util Collection import javax swing tree TreeModel import thyme component ModelAB import thyme id ThId import t4g share WidgetIdentifier public class SharedTreeModel extends ModelAB implements TreeModel protected WidgetIdentifier wid public SharedTreeModel ThId thid Collection args super thid args public v
234. upware toolkits collaborative systems this approach typically lends itself to strong WYSIWIS applications Replicated architectures provide a clear path to enable multi user applications which are straight forward and simple However a replicated architecture may fail when used for a complex groupware application especially where there are a mixture of strict and relaxed WYSIWIS user interfaces as the replicated architecture often has no concept of partial replication or altered replication of the application data Doing relaxed WYSIWIS applications with a replicated architecture is at least more complex than through some other methods WYSIWIS The What You See Is What I See WYSIWIS properties of a group ware application describe the private public dichotomy of the collaboration There are several WYSIWIS configurations found in the literature A strict implementation has purely replicated interfaces each application has an identi cal interface and data set A relaxed implementation allows for a combination of shared unshared and differently displayed views in the application Some frameworks have no enforced WYSIWIS policy The remainder of this section will discuss some representative groupware frame works Table 2 3 summarizes this discussion CHAPTER 2 RELATED LITERATURE 44 Collaboration Bus sto
235. uss techniques and toolkits that have been developed to support the construction of groupware with an eye towards reducing the engineering costs of building and rebuilding groupware applications CHAPTER 2 RELATED LITERATURE 41 2 3 1 Toolkits Groupware toolkits also referred to as frameworks or libraries provide much of the infrastructure for building collaborative applications As more features are imple mented in software libraries frameworks or toolkits less work is required by the developer The benefit is that more time can be spent on analyzing refining the ap plication and further studying the interaction The existing groupware frameworks can be divided by how the framework manages the collaboration topology In this section existing same time different place toolkits are discussed based on the following three properties Architecture Type Architecture Type refers to how the user s client interacts with the other users clients There are two basic types discussed herein The first is Client Server which is the classic model of a networked application Each client interacts directly with a well known centralized object called the server When the server receives new data it sends the data to the clients Generally the server is a bottleneck in that all data must pass through it If the network to the server is overloaded the whole collaboration is affected Similarly if the server fails or is overloaded the
236. uting model will not work The THYME component collection introduces a new component called a bus which is multi point routing technique Micb UM99 The bus provides two routing features unavailable through the traditional routing model First the sending com ponent does not need to have awareness of the set of component identifiers that are receiving the message The bus knows the component identifiers or knows how to get them the sending component does not This feature allows components to subscribe to a channel of information possibly being populated by multiple publishing compo nents Normally the publishing components would need visibility of every subscribing component violating the encapsulation promised by the subscription to a channel Second the delivery of messages via a bus can have conditional rules associated with it For example in the circuit bus described below depending on the position in the bus of the sending component a specific set of components will receive the message If a message is sent by a component in a different position a different set of components will receive the message The bus component holds a set of component identifiers When the bus component receives a message it will based on the routing rules contained within the bus select a subset of its contained identifiers that will receive the message The bus is defined in Definition 30 Two example buses the circuit bus and the broadcast bus are
237. ve two types of equivalence equivalence of resolved components and equivalence of the identifiers themselves Resolved equivalence is defined in Definition 10 Identifier equivalence is defined in Definition 11 Definition 10 Given two identifiers I and J I and J are resolved equivalently during the timeslice t x y if COMP EQUIV ALENT RESOLVE 1 RESOLV E J at every instant during t x y CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 63 ID RESOLVED EQUIV ALENT I J teiwg Yr x lt T lt y COMP EQUIV ALENT RESOLV E I r RESOLV E J 1 1 Definition 11 Given two identifiers I and J I and J are equivalent identifiers if they will always resolve to the same component for all possible timeslices ID EQUIVALENTU J Vr 0 lt T lt COMP EQUIV ALENT RESOLV E J t 7 RESOLV E J t 1 The Chat Room Properties The chat room is a component collection containing three component the Incom ingChatView the OutgoingChat View and the ChatCommunicationModel Each of these components either accept or produce a specific message the ChatCommunica tionMessage This message contains two possible data objects the username and the utterance It has three possible actions login logout and utterance The production and acceptance sets of the composite components therefore is the one element set of the ChatCommunicationMessage Ideally if these components were to not interact with any other messages they could be combined with o
238. w Repository service Incoming Chat component View Message Router Chat L Communication Model Chat Room Components Figure 3 4 Components and services a eee Outgoing Chat Component iew Repository Incoming Chat View Chat Message Communication odel Id To Id From Chat Room Components Data Data Data Figure 3 5 Messages data and identifiers Figure 3 5 again based on the chat room shows the three other types of THYME objects the message data and identifier Messages are used to communicate between components They package a set of data that is passed between components which the component uses to alter its underlying state replace its internal state or interpret as a request The identifier is used to represent a local or remote component being resolved into a component reference at run time by a component resolver service Throughout this dissertation each object is referred to as follows Components are denoted as C CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 55 Messages are referred to as M and contain a set of data objects D1 D2 Dn and an action datum O Identifiers are represented by T Data objects are denoted with the symbol D Services are referenced by S or as C when using the service in a component context Components may also be grouped into composite components which inherit the properties of the union of their constituent parts An application identified b
239. when rapid changes can be made to the application especially in a research or educational set CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 25 ting The orthogonal component architecture limits the scope of changes made to the system source code reducing the likelihood of new defects being introduced into the application as new components are added or existing ones changed Consequently new analysis iterations can be done faster and the system can be refined quicker and more extensively 1 4 Contribution of this Thesis Online ethnographic analysis can provide precise insight into how the community of users is interacting with the application and show the developers how the system needs to be changed The information it provides can be very valuable when combined with user feedback showing where the problems are and giving both context and objective information User feedback alone in contrast has no context and contains purely subjective information In the VesselWorld application the use of analysis techniques in conjunction with traditional forms of behavioral and user study provided valuable insight Using the ethnographic analysis techniques described in this work requires both an investment of technology and acceptance of the ethnographic analysis techniques as part of the development process The technology investment needs to be minimized otherwise the process may not be used Software development is plagued by a lack of resources and even throug
240. wo major technologies a component library that supports the replay of collected THYME transcripts and a tool that generates a SAGE replay application based on a basis THYME application The next section shows the use the ethnographic replay tool to study a session of CHAPTER 4 OBSERVATIONAL ANALYSIS OF GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS91 activity from the Online Research Assistant ORA application Through a demon stration of analysis the requirements for transcription and replay are discussed in the section following How THYME and SAGE implement these capabilities is dis cussed and formalized and the code generation and assembly features are detailed This chapter concludes with some examples of the other analysis capabilities that are enabled by this approach 4 1 Online Research Application The ORA application which was shown in the previous chapter as an example of a THYME groupware application has an associated replay capability Figure 4 1 shows this replay application which was built from the ORA application This application was generated using the SAGE generator program described below From a comparison of the ORA replay application Figure 4 1 and the basis ORA application Figure 3 13 it is clear that they share a common lineage The center replay window is a direct analogue of the ORA client screen and contains individual view components that are leveraged completely from the basis application The underlying models however a
241. y however requires a third party client such as the room to veto a message from a component that does not control the floor Otherwise the CHAPTER 6 USE OF THYME IN THE CLASSROOM 137 ORAv2 Application Chat Room Shared Whiteboard Shared Browser Subsystem Subsystem Subsystem THYME Groupware Component Collection THYME Reference THYME Basic i Implementation Component Collection THYME API THYME Component Model THYME Core Figure 6 6 Component and subsystem layout in ORAv2 component could be compromised and maliciously or accidentally ignore the floor ownership 6 4 3 Extension Points Many projects were implemented by modifying existing components instead of ex tending or adding components Our belief is that they did this because the specific components that they wanted to extend did not expose a useful set of extension points One of our immediate goals is to determine what points of extension are most useful and how to make it possible and easy for developers to take advantage of them The ORA project is one of the better examples of an application that embeds THYME components through its extension points Figure 6 6 shows the embedded subsystems and components that are used in this application Chapter 7 The Lifecycle Revisited Chapter 3 showed techniques for the rapid building and modification of groupware applications These applications could be built in a significantly reduced amount
242. y A is one such example of a composite component The composite component is defined as COMPOSITE C C2 Cn A composite component can be part of another composite component The chat room is often used as a composite component that consists of the set INCOMING CHAT VIEW OUTGOING CHAT VIEW CHAT COMMUNICATION MODEL The interaction between components is restricted by the following rules 1 Identifiers are long lived component references are short lived A caller should never hold on to a component reference past its immediate use meaning past sending a message or set of messages In any case the component reference should not be used outside of the current method scope The general pattern for using a component is to dereferencing the component identifier to a component reference using that reference and discarding it When sending a message to a component the message is addressed with the identifier of the receiving component CHAPTER 3 BUILDING GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS 56 2 Components should interact via messages whenever possible Services can be interacted with directly or via messages 3 Components should be able to handle unexpected messages and data Assume that other components can be hostile compromised or just buggy In these cases the component should not fail or end up with a corrupted state Dropping a message because it is incorrect or unexpected is correct behavior Similarly a component should be
243. y load the waste on the large barge which is the goal of their activity The last two lines confirm their success During the analysis of the transcript the replay tool is used to understand the context of their activity If a breakdown occurs the analyst can see exactly what failed which may or may not be what the users report in their chat 1 2 3 The VesselWorld and VW SAGE Architecture The VesselWorld architecture was insufficient as a basis for building other groupware applications As different types of applications were conceived and designed it be came clear that the VesselWorld and VW SAGE architectures would not support the variety of groupware applications that were envisioned In the VesselWorld system each application client was divided into six major sub applications each having a different responsibility within the client The Vessel World server which processes the users planned activity is also an application client with a slightly different sets of components Each major subsystem had a front end component which had responsibility for creation and access to the other parts of CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 16 Cranel now a joint carry clicked at 375 140 got 3 carrys Crane2 i will do same Crane2 move to first location Cranel submitted first Crane2 ditto Cranel again Crane2 yes Tugl do you want to just type something in after submitting each turn Cranel submitted second Crane2
244. y software model The modified software model incorporates explicit analysis of the application during each prototype spiral giving insight as to how the application performs during actual use and allowing the application to be adapted over time The types of software tools and methods required to support this methodology are also discussed This thesis further focuses on how to rapidly build modify and analyze the groupware application within limited budgetary constraints Four major case studies are detailed that support the claims made in this work The first shows early attempts to build a groupware application and understand the limitations of the traditional engineering process The second illustrates how the lifecycle can support the end to end engineering of a groupware application from initial building to analysis The third and fourth case studies showcase additional vi vil uses of the these techniques including how the reference toolkits and development model were used in a classroom term project and how an example system built in the classroom was used as the basis of an experimental platform Contents Abstract 1 Introduction 1 1 Online Ethnographic Analysis of Online Behavior 1 2 A Case St dy o a a aoaie Boa tay cae save Gena st aR Ge ae gt eet a age eh Let ke N K3 TCheiEhesis Proble yoe G ete sete oo cia sete Gees He ay Oo Fe et Sees 1 4 Contribution of this Thesis due a 4 dus amp o alanis

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