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Compared to a decade ago, when the first comprehensive study was done in software maintenance, many changes have occurred in the practice of system development. Longitudinal data were obtained by using the same survey instrument, updated to reflect current practices, and sampling the same population. Comparing the current with 1977 results has helped to identify the persistent problems and issues as well as the emerging problems and issues. One of the important, but somewhat disturbing, conclusions is that maintenance problems are pretty much the same as during the 1970s (except for minor changes), despite advances made in structured methodologies and techniques. In terms of specific problems, personnel problems of maintenance programmers, i.e. turnover and availability, and programmer effectiveness problems, i.e. skills, motivation and productivity, have shown a rise, while problems associated with users' knowledge of computer systems have declined.

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/ authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation.Abstract This paper explores how group cognition can provide a basis for understanding knowledge creation and sharing that does not depend on the assumption of extant internal representations that ®lter sense-data. Literature from a wide variety of disciplines is synthesized to provide an ecologically-oriented model of group cognition. Group cognition means moving away from idiosyncratic, subjective mental models of the world to the notion that agents with similar capacities to act can potentially discern similar action possibilities in the world. It changes the direction from discovery and alignment of mental models to selectivity calibration and informational structure sharing.``What one thinks'' at a given moment is dependent on boundary objects available at the moment that predominately originate with human actors. Therefore, in this way, one's cognition is predominately group cognition. Based on the breadth of the topic, this paper must be considered a work-in-progress, a snapshot of the exploration of such a complex subject. It provides an alternate view of knowledge creation and sharing as the basis for incorporating more effective collaboration functionality into technologies that support joint work. This paper challenges long-held views of extant internal representations that ®lter sense-data and offers a radically different ecological-based model of group cognition.Initiation of cycle: boundary-object exposure to an individual agent, i.e. something external to the cognitive domain and observable by an agent. Some considerations of boundary-object exposure that affect sensemaking include that a boundary object:J must be available at the right time;J must be projected from the right agent/s; J may be actively``searched for/pulled-in'' by an agent, including action by the agent to uncover/clarify signals;J must have suf®cient clarity and strength, i.e. the inherent properties of the boundary object to project clearly over the noise in the environment.Constructing meaning (make sense): some factors that affect the process of construing meaning of an exposed boundary object (i.e. perceiving affordance), must include:

Abstract-This paper provides an introduction to the special issue on Expanding the Boundaries of E-Collaboration. It presents an operational definition of the term e-collaboration, and a historical review of the development of e-collaboration tools and related academic research. That is followed by an introductoryWhen a research topic becomes important enough to be the target of an entire journal issue, especially in a journal as prestigious as the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION, that is a sign that there is a community of researchers whose work gravitates around that topic. Also, it is often the case that the topic's scope has become broad enough to allow for multiple interpretations regarding what characterizes scholarly investigations on that topic. E-collaboration is certainly no exception to this general rule, which begs the questions: what, exactly, is e-collaboration? E-collaboration has been defined in many ways in the past, and the number of definitions has grown recently. This situation has been intensified by the emergence of an e-collaboration tools industry, with major players such as Microsoft Corporation and IBM wanting a piece of the pie. For the purposes of this article, we will adopt the operational definition proposed by the guest editors of the first special issue on e-collaboration, published in 2001 in Australia in the Journal of Systems and Information Technology. That definition stated that e-collaboration is "collaboration among individuals engaged in a common task using electronic technologies" [1, p. 1].Based on the definition above, we can safely say that, contrary to popular perceptions, e-collaboration is not limited to computer mediated communication (CMC), or computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), because other electronic technologies exist that are not (strictly speaking) computers and that can be used to support collaboration among individuals engaged in a common task. One example is the telephone, which was one of the main targets of a major study conducted in the 1970s by Short et al. It also follows as a corollary from the above definition that e-collaboration may take place without any CMC, or CSCW-another idea that runs against widespread perception. For example, let us consider the scattered members of an army platoon, using rudimentary electronic devices to indicate their location and transmit basic information to each other, while performing a joint recognizance task of a certain geographic area. Those platoon members are in fact engaging in e-collaboration according to our definition of the term.That is not to say that most instances of e-collaboration will not involve computers. In fact, the opposite is the case, and this is reflected in how hardware and software vendors regularly discuss related technologies. Contemporary e-collaboration technology vendors often define e-collaboration with an emphasis on technological support for electronic meetings over the internet. Among those vendors are the above-mentioned Microsoft Corporation and IBM, as w...