Concepts for usable patterns of groupware applications

Abstract

Patterns, which are based on in-depth practical experience, can be instructing for the design of groupware applications as sociotechnical systems. On the basis of a summary of the concept of patterns -as elaborated by the architect Christopher Alexander -its adoptions within computer science are retraced and relationships to the area of groupware are described. General principles for patterns within this domain are formulated and supported by examples from a wide range of experience with knowledge management systems. The analysis reveals that every pattern of a groupware application has to combine the description of social as well as technical structures, and that a single pattern can only be understood in the context of a pattern language. It also shows that such a language has to integrate patterns of socio-technical solutions with measures and procedures for introducing them, and that the language not only has to express one type of directed relationship between the patterns but a variety of different types which have to be deliberately assigned to the patterns.

A Patterns System to Coordinate Mobile Collaborative Applications

“…There are also a number of collaboration patterns which can be studied in order to try to understand the coordination mechanisms encapsulated behind those collaboration models (de Vreede and Briggs 2001;Herrmann et al 2003;Pinelle and Gutwin 2006;Zurita et al 2008). The analysis of these patterns could provide some insight on how to coordinate mobile workers' activities; however such research effort is still pending.…”

Groupware development support with technology patterns

“…POSA2 (Schmidt et al, 2000) or the collection of Guerrero and Fuller (1999) that focuses on technical infrastructures for groupware applications. Other collections have focused on specific groupware domains like knowledge management (Herrmann et al, 2003) or group support systems (Kolfschoten et al, 2004). As Erickson (2000) pointed out, pattern languages can serve as a Lingua Franca for human-computer interaction design.…”

Defining and using Collaboration Patterns for Software Process Development

“…Some research works can be found in the literature about collaboration patterns (Verginadis et al, 2010;Herrmann T., et al 2003;Erickson, 2000), but very limited work has been done about their automatic application during software development.…”