Socio-technical walkthrough

Abstract

How can the documentation of concepts for complex sociotechnical systems, such as the adoption of groupware, be incorporated into practices of PD? Documents are important in supporting participants in their decision-making and in serving as a guidance for the ongoing project. To create such documents a mix of abstract graphical models and illustrative material can be used. There is evidence which suggests that they can be successfully employed if they are embedded into a communication process which is facilitated in a specific manner: The socio-technical walkthrough (STWT) that supports a participatory process during which concepts of such systems are (re-)considered step by step. A case study describes the challenges and benefits of the STWT paying special attention to aspects such as facilitating strategies, required preparation, training, characteristics of the diagrams, and accompanying work.

Socio-technical Self-Description as a Means for Projects of Introducing Computer Supported Cooperation

“…In our cases, not only the members of the development team had to be involved, and we had to accept that the documents were partially ambiguous. In [8] it is described how the STWT facilitates the communication processes and the organizational change. Our research resulted also in a tool -the SeeMe-Editor -for creating, presenting and jointly editing the diagrams.…”

“…The diagrams were a means to capture the multiple facets of the discussion. During the case study, 10 workshops following the facilitation method STWT [8] were conducted resulting in about 25 semi-structured diagrams. Fig.…”

“…One method is posing the right questions. Facilitating STWT-Workshops which support an organizational unit's development of a StSd requires preparing a set of questions from which the facilitator can flexibly select [8]. Using these questions for group meetings should not be confused with the document analysis or the interviews which usually should take place before the workshop to explore the field of the CSCW usage.…”

“…This way an integrated discussion of work-procedures and technical artifacts is supported (cp. [8] for a discussion on facilitation methods). Since the diagrams serving as StSd are meant to support the communication among the roles being part of the prject rather than supporting the detailed technical specification of a software system, it is useful to shift detailed technical representations into separate documents which are then linked to the corresponding entities in the diagrams.…”

Progressive scenarios

“…Scenario-based design and socio-technical walkthrough in participatory design [3] are also known to situate developers and users within a concrete context of use in a timely manner, thus the methods are often used for requirement analysis, design evaluations, and user reflections. Scenarios consist of task goals, activities, evaluation plans, actions and events [4], and socio-technical walkthrough uses diagrams to depict possible system concepts.…”