Using Collaboration Tools to Improve Artifact Consistency in CS577 Projects Allen Kou

Motivation Concurrent engineering can lead to inconsistent artifacts Finding and fixing inconsistencies is time consuming and tedious It’s easy for minor inconsistencies to go unnoticed

Sharing Artifacts Common Approach: Email and Team Website

Problems Availability Does not promote collaboration Referencing out of date documents Intermediate versions may not be available Everyone may not have same versions Does not promote collaboration Only focus on your own document Ignore other documents Documents are large Tedious to search individually Latest version may show up few hours before the due date despite lots of intermediate edits. Every man for themselves attitude. Documents are relatively large, ~50 pages, takes a while to load on an old laptop, no easy way to search all documents without doing them individually.

Examples of Inconsistency 1 SSAD Use Case Examples from Team 6. Don’t mean to pick on my teammates but I’m familiar with our artifacts.

Examples of Inconsistency 1 SSAD Use Case SSRD Requirement 6

Examples of Inconsistency 2 FED Evaluation Summary SSAD Styles, Patterns, Frameworks This is a very subtle inconsistency.

Examples of Inconsistency 2 FED Evaluation Summary SSAD Styles, Patterns, Frameworks ASP.NET MVC 3 requires Visual Studio 2010! 8

Collaboration Tools 3 extremely popular tools 1) Google Docs 2) SharePoint 3) Zoho

Google Docs – Features 1 Search collections Collections Sharing Settings Version Management

Google Docs – Features 2 Concurrency control See who else is viewing the document Chat with others viewing the document Concurrent edits appear in real time

Google Docs – Pros and Cons Intuitive & easy to use Search entire documents Access & concurrency control Cons Messes up 577 template header / footer format Error converting CS 577 documents No version management for doc? Users are polarized Requires internet access 1 MB single file upload limit? Polarized -> love it (one less microsoft product) or hate it (used to office) Give an overall summary – good tool, nice features, intuitive

SharePoint Features Collaborative Document Management Checkout documents View revisions Access control Integration with Office Build collaboration environment Etc … Popular enterprise solution. Very powerful tool that does a lot, including document management.

SharePoint… Image from http://blog.pentalogic.net/2010/11/how-much-does-sharepoint-cost/

Zoho – Features Same main features provided by Google Docs

Zoho – Features 2 Offline mode Install a plugin Access documents while offline

Zoho – Features 3 Microsoft Office plugin Access and edit Zoho documents using Office Windows only

How do collaboration tools help? If we change Requirement CR-38 (based on the earlier example) Search all documents to see what references CR-38 Modify other documents as necessary Every member can easily access the most up to date document Easier to track progress and share information Search all documents Set control access… maybe one person can edit SSAD / SSRD

Conclusion Many effective tools for collaborative document management Each have strengths and weaknesses Superior to only using emails and the team website Fixing inconsistencies in artifacts is tedious and difficult Document management tools can reduce the number of inconsistencies