ANALYSIS OF DEVELOPMENT COOPERATION WITH SHARED AUTHORING ENVIRONMENT IN ACADEMIC SETTING

International Journal on Integrating Technology in Education (IJITE) Vol.1, No.1, December 2012
1
ANALYSIS OF DEVELOPMENT COOPERATION WITH
SHARED AUTHORING ENVIRONMENT IN
ACADEMIC SETTING
Lei Wu1
, Sharon White2
, Yi Feng3
1,2
Software Engineering, University of Houston-Clear Lake, Houston, U.S.A
wul,whites@uhcl.edu
3
Computer Science, Algoma University, Sault Ste. Marie, Canada
feng@algomau.ca
ABSTRACT
Team work is an important training element of future software engineers. However, the evaluation of the
performance of collaboration among individuals is very subjective. Meanwhile, how to effectively
promote the collaboration in an academic setting is an even more challenging task. The lack of a common
standard or method for the assessment is a practical issue in software engineering projects. With the
rapid development of shared authoring environments, such as Wiki, more and more educational
institutions are studying the adaptability of such kind of collaborative platforms. In order to study the
applicability of adopting wiki-based shared authoring environments in software engineering education,
we have proposed three major research questions. By solving these problems, we try to answer some of
the most important questions in adopting shared authoring platforms in academic settings.
.
KEYWORDS
Shared authoring platform, collaboration evaluation, task tracing, quality control
1. INTRODUCTION
Adopting Wiki-based shared authoring platforms in software engineering program is a newly
emerged practice among many educational institutions [1][7][9]. The effectiveness and
adaptability varies largely based on different education objectives [4][5][11]. In order to study
the applicability of adopting wiki-based shared authoring environments in software engineering
education, we have proposed three major research questions. By solving these problems, we try
to answer some of the most important questions in adopting wiki in academic setting
environment.
Based on these research questions, we closely monitored five senior software engineering
projects. We have studied the effectiveness of using wikis-based environments to support
software engineering development process in an educational setting. We further discuss the
experiences and the discoveries learned from the development activities, and we also discuss the
limitations of applying shared authoring environments in software engineering education.
2. RESEARCH QUESTIONS
The sponsored senior software engineering projects and the use of real stakeholders with close
to industry-level requirements are critical to our research questions. These construct a suitable
environment for us to monitor and evaluate the effects of certain types of software engineering
practices and corresponding support environments. In our study, we focus on wikis-supported
shared authoring environments. We have proposed following three major research questions:

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1. Would the use of web-enabled groupware cause the students to have a better understanding
of the stakeholders, their needs, and the development process itself?
2. What types of such groupware will gain more advantages in terms of collaboration support
for each side of stakeholders?
3. What are the limitations of applying such systems in software engineering educational
settings?
3. SOFTWARE ENGINEERING DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS
We have selected five software engineering projects in academic setting as individual study
cases to analyze the effectiveness of using wiki-based development supporting systems in a
typical software engineering project. The author has worked as faculty coach for these five
projects. Detail project process data has been collected. The project team normally consist of
four to five senior software engineering students. The development length is six months. The
projects are proposed by a variety of commercial companies or not-for-profit organizations
across the country in the USA. By nature, each project is an example of collaborative
development involving at least two development stakeholders who are geographically separated.
This presents a great challenge of distributive software development. How to support the
collaborations becomes an important issue for such type of development activities. Following is
a detail description of each project.
I. SMN Project (Shared Multimedia Network for Picture Frames)
Figure 1. Shared Multimedia Network for Picture Frames
The primary task of this project is to create a platform that will allow Kodak Research Lab to
implement systems for transferring multimedia content (picture, music, and video files) between
different personal devices in a household environment. Remote devices can also be accessed
through an Internet connection. The connection between devices should be seamless and
transparent (ad-hoc) to both experienced and inexperienced users. The secondary task is to
demonstrate a few possible use cases by creating applications built upon the platform.

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II. ITW Project (Intellisync Troubleshooting Wizard for NOKIA Mobile
E-mail System)
Figure 2. Intellisync Troubleshooting Wizard for NOKIA Mobile E-mail System
The Intellisync Troubleshooting Wizard is a self-help system designed to allow cell-phone users
to troubleshoot their own mobile e-mail configuration problems regarded to the Intellisync
system. The system displays a series of questions and predetermined responses that will guide
the user toward an optimal solution to their Intellisync mobile e-mail service difficulties. The
resulting product is a web-based solution with future extension to host on mobile device.
III. CASG Project (Computer Aided Scenario Generator for Environmental
Decision Making)
Figure 3. Computer Aided Scenario Generator for Environmental Decision Making
This project is a part of a multi-disciplinary project which will assist policy analysts in
understanding the impact of greenhouse gas emissions reduction policies on the automobile
sector. It seeks to gather the interface requirements for policy analysts using multiple modeling
systems to generate and execute policy scenarios. It also seeks to define the requirements and
architecture for the underlying model interactions and how the input and output of these models

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will be visually presented to and manipulated by the policy analysts. The key facets of the
interface explorations is the abstraction and introspection of complex model input and output,
the aggregation of input variables, and a documentation support system for the models being
used.
IV. FADPR Project (Friedreich's Ataxia Disease Patient Registry)
Figure 4. Friedreich's Ataxia Disease Patient Registry
The patient registry captures demographic and basic clinical information from individuals with
Friedreich's Ataxia (FA) Disease worldwide through an interactive website. The registry stores
the information collected and FARA (FA Research Alliance) will be able to query the database
for researchers and pharmaceutical companies who need candidates for clinical trials. A
patients' basic contact information and personal health information (PHI) will be housed by the
registry. Access to patients interested in and eligible for clinical trials will substantially aide in
the reduction of clinical research resources, specifically time and cost. Implementation of this
solution brings researchers and individuals with FA one step closer to a treatment.
V. SAHS Project (Secure Applications with Hardware Security Modules)
Figure 5. Secure Applications with Hardware Security Modules
The main task of this project is to evaluate the feasibility of developing a web service to interact
with the Luna hardware security module (HSM) provided by the sponsor company-SafeNet Inc.
The web service will act as a secure generic point of communication to access secure
information guarded by the HSM. The web service will manage secure keys held by the HSM to
encrypt/decrypt sensitive data held in a database for authenticated users.

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4. PROJECT EXPERIMENTS AND WIKI-SUPPORTS ANALYSIS
Each project is proposed by external commercial sponsor or not-for-profit organization. The
sponsor is responsible for providing all necessary development resources, as well as financial
supports. Student development team will receive hardware and software equipment. In most
cases, domain-specific training from sponsors is required for the development project. However,
it is mainly the student team’s decision on the development environment settings, process
selections, and quality control mechanisms, even though sponsors may provide guidance or
suggestions.
Therefore, we will see a wide variety of configurations of development environment settings.
This gives us an opportunity to monitor the usage of collaborative groupware supporting
systems in software project development activities, and evaluate the effectiveness of adopting
such kind of systems. It enables us to further answer the research questions presented in section
two.
Table_1 provides a brief description of the detail configurations of each project that the we have
closely monitored. A comparative study has been conducted to analyze the effectiveness of
adopting wiki-based supporting environment in software development projects.
Table 1. Project construction components
Project Name Sponsor Stakeholder
Collaborative Development Nature
& Shared Authoring Groupware Support
FADPR
FARA
Friedreich's Ataxia
(FA) Disease
Research Alliance
• The team collaborated with EDS inc. and FARA
both locally and remotely (cross states)
• No shared authoring groupware support
SAHS SafeNet Inc.
• SafeNet Inc. is located in Ottawa, Canada.
• Remotely collaborated with SafeNet Inc.
development team (cross countries)
• With shared authoring
• Not wiki
CASG
Department of Public
Policy at Rochester
Institute of
Technology
• Michigan State University
• California State University
• Remotely collaborated with researchers from
above universities (cross states)
• With shared authoring groupware
• Wiki-based system
ITW Nokia Boston Lab
• Remotely collaborated with Nokia Boston Lab
(cross states)
• Wiki-based system with development support
SMN Kodak Research Lab
• Both locally and remotely collaborated with
Kodak Research Lab (within state)
• Wiki-based system with development support

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5. ASSESSMENT & LESSONS LEARNED
Team work is an important training element of future software engineers. However, the
evaluation of the performance of collaboration among individuals is very subjective. The lack of
a common standard or method for the evaluation is a practical problem in an academic setting.
To alleviate the difficulty, we have adopted a three-point evaluation mechanism to leverage the
limitations. This helps us to better monitor the team’s performance.
One point of the evaluation process is the pure observation of team performance by the faculty
coach. The coach will participate in the team’s work twice a week in a fixed team room setting.
During these two interactions, faculty coach will listen to team report, give advices, discuss with
the students, observe team’s interactions with sponsors, and monitor the internal team work
involving all members, etc. The other assessment point is the sponsor’s evaluation. Sponsors
will be invited to participate in team’s work at least once a week. Since it is not always possible
for sponsors being locally available, a video/voice conference call is normally adopted to
service the collaboration purpose. The third assessment point is the peer evaluation from each
team member. We provide three different evaluation templates for each part of the stakeholders
to evaluate the teamwork as a whole, and each individual student as well. The combined result
will more likely to be subjective and fair.
Table 2 shows the assessment result for the five projects. An analysis study has been conducted
to further investigate the cause.
Table 2. Assessment and Analysis
Project Evaluation Analysis
FADPR
• Major issue arisen for
lack of
communication
• Sponsor pointed out
one student works
superior than others
• Same student was
pointed out as
“Problem Creator” by
all other students
• The team collaborated with EDS inc. (Sponsor 1)
locally – relatively smooth
• With FARA (Sponsor 2) remotely – mostly
difficult
• There’s lack of communication about what each
individual is currently working on and the
progress
• Overlaps of same work task among different
students
• Without shared authoring platform support,
remote collaboration with sponsor 2 is most
painful
SAHS
• Minimal
collaboration issues
during the middle of
the process
• Solved quickly
• The sponsor company
is very satisfied with
the progress and final
result
• Communication among two teams from two
countries is a challenge
• Lack of face to face discussions
• Internet-based shared authoring groupware helped
the team to smoothly convey development
information to sponsor
• When issues do arise, the web discussion from
shared authoring platform ease the way of
collaboration
CASG • Multiple stakeholders provided multi-dimensional

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• Different viewpoints
from different
research groups
creates big problems
for students
• Lack of standard
terminology of
requirement
requirements
• Confusion among these requirements
• Shared authoring platform Doku-Wiki provides a
debate & agreement-making platform for
development team to communicate with multiple
stakeholders
• Problems were solved quickly
ITW
• Consistent
requirement change
• Smooth interaction
with Nokia Boston
Lab
• Sponsor has made several major requirement
changes during the whole development process
• Shared authoring platform Trac-wiki has been
proven as a successful supporting platform
• Acted as both information portal and development
center
SMN
• Two students
significantly lack of
contribution
• Collaborative
development is
boosted by Trac-Wiki
environment
• Kodak Research Lab noticed the inconsistency
• Shared authoring platform Trac-Wiki successfully
captured the lack of development contribution
from specific students
• The development bug ticketing feature from Trac-
Wiki promoted the collaborative bug shooting,
and increased the efficiency
From table 2, we can find out some interesting results. Project FADPR hasn’t adopted any
collaboration enforcement mechanism. It has witnessed severe issues that related with
collaborative team-work. Project SAHS and CASG have used web-based groupware and Doku-
Wiki [2] respectively to support the collaborations among development team members and
stakeholders. Both have successfully solved the challenges that they have faced during the
process of development. Project ITW and SMN have adopted Trac-wiki, a development-
supported wiki platform, to foster the collaborative development activities among different
teams. The experimental result shows that, Shared authoring platforms, the Trac-wiki and
Doku-Wiki supporting environments are crucial for the success of these two projects.
Meanwhile, Trac-wiki also captures the weakness among individual team members during
different stages of the project. This provides a more substantial tool for project managers to
monitor the progress of the project and the performance of individual member.
6. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
Reviewing the three major research questions we have presented in section two, we would like
to answer these questions based on the lessons we learned from our experiments.
Question 1: Would the use of groupware cause the students to have a better understanding of
the stakeholders, their needs, and the development process itself?
Answer: Our response is yes. With the experience of applying shared authoring platform, we
have noticed that, the understanding of the stakeholders’ background and needs have been
enhanced. This is achieved though the multiple versions of documenting customers’
requirements, clarify the uncertainties, answering development team and customers’ questions.
On the other hand, the understanding of the current stages of development process is further

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enhanced through the publication of project progress. All these are accommodated by the
adopted shared authoring groupware platforms.
Question 2: What types of such groupware will gain more advantages in terms of collaboration
support for each side of stakeholders?
Answer: wiki-based shared authoring platform environments have shown great advantages in
this domain. There’re two major factors that make wiki more capable than the majority of other
general purpose groupware. First, wiki-based systems present a robust knowledge sharing
center[8][11], which have simple and similar user interface for developers to use. This is very
important for the success of software development project[9][12]. Secondly, wiki-based systems
provide a variety of different supporting environments ranging from collaborative development
process to testing, integration, transition, and maintenance, etc. These cover almost every
aspect of software development process.
Question 3: What are the limitations of applying such systems in software engineering
educational settings?
Answer: the major limitations of applying shared authoring systems in software engineering
educational setting lie on two aspects. One is the learning curves of many wiki-based shared
authoring platforms[18][20]. For example, in order to use Doku-Wiki and Trac-Wiki, user has
to learn the syntax. This will impose a certain kind of learning activities to master them during
the usage[19][16], even though this may not be a significant obstacle. The second limitation lies
on the lack of proper usages of different types of shared authoring systems among different
participants. Indeed, this is crucial to the success of applying such systems in development
project[15][[6]. Shared authoring platform only provides the possibility of fostering
collaboration[13][14]. However, it cannot guarantee the quality of collaboration [7][10]. There’s
a lack of a general mechanism to balance the enthusiasm and aloofness among different
participants. Meanwhile, it also lacks of a mechanism to establish the authority level among a
large number of co-authoring results.
With the developing and testing an explosion of ideas and practices for shared authoring
platform community [2][3][17][21], we will greatly benefit from its development results. We
strongly believe that the future wiki-based shared authoring platform will be designed not only
suitable for software engineering activities, but also suitable for the vast majority of the “online
generation”, either it is project-oriented or organization-oriented.
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[3] Trac-Wiki, (2012), http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracWiki
[4] Decker, B.; Ras, E.; Rech, J.; Jaubert, P.; Rieth, M. (2007), “Wiki-based stakeholder participation in
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networked learning (pp. 175-203). Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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[8] Lonchamp, J. (2006). Supporting synchronous collaborative learning: A generic, multi-dimensional
model.International Journal of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning, 1(2), 247-276.
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Authoring Activities Infrastructure Design through Grid Portal Technology. In Proc. of The 7th WSEAS
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Authors
Lei Wu, Assistant Professor of software engineering at University of Houston-Clear
Lake, Houston, U.S.A. His major research interests include software engineering with
artificial intelligence, secure service-oriented architectures, software for robotics and
embedded system intelligence, game software development, and pervasive computing. He
can be reached atwul@uhcl.edu
Sharon White, Associate Professor of software engineering at University of Houston-
Clear Lake, Houston, U.S.A. Her research interests include domain specification
languages, architecture design languages, and software architecture. She can be reached at
whites@uhcl.edu
Yi Feng, Associate Professor of computer science, Algoma University, Sault Ste. Marie,
Canada. Her major research interests include formal verification, software engineering,
signal processing, and system description languages. She can be reached at
feng@algomau.ca

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