External Requirements of Groupware Development Tools.pdfVIP

External Requirements of Groupware Development Tools T.C. Nicholas Graham and John Grundy Department of Computing and Information Science, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, K7L 3N6, graham@qucis.queensu.ca Department of Computer Science, University of Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton, New Zealand, jgrundy@cs.waikato.ac.nz Abstract : The EHCI’98 Workshop on Requirements of Groupware Development Tools examined six groupware applications in order to derive requirements for tools for developing groupware. We hope that these requirements will be useful to designers of new tools in motivating what features their tools should have. Key words: Groupware Development Tools, Requirements 1. INTRODUCTION Recent research in tools for developing groupware applications has focused on increasing the range of applications that can be built using high-level tools. For example, significant advances have been made in: – Support for flexible coupling, allowing users to configure the granularity of their interaction with other users (Dewan, 1992; Grundy in this volume); – Support for versioning/merging, allowing users to dynamically migrate between shared and private work (Munson, 1994; Edwards, 1997); – Support for group awareness, such as the provision of awareness widgets in a toolkit (Gutwin, 1998); – Support for combining synchronous and asynchronous styles, such as rooms or web pages with synchronous applications (Roseman, 1996; Graham, 1997); – Support for making existing applications into groupware, recognizing that many existing applications cannot be rewritten as custom groupware (Begole, 1997); – Support for sound and video, to allow multimedia to be used in a multiuser context (Dewan, 1992; Graham, 1997); – Support for workflow, to aid in the coordination of groups (Grundy, 1998).