The implementation of this thesis work is mostly a prototype, hence there is a plenty of rooms for additional functionalities. At the moment, information is only shared in form of text, it is definitely necessary to implement more resource sharing functions such as
image or file to strengthen the effectiveness of communication. In addition, the system entities are mostly viewed and managed in naive way, without any search functions to make it more time-efficient. Implementing a basic search function may not be too difficult, but an advanced one will require considerable effort. Currently, the basic method of raising awareness of information is implemented as email sending, yet huge effort needs doing subsequently to ensure high engagement of information articulation. For instance, notification and reminder functionalities for new activities in workgroup and ticket. By these means, overall participation review is more ensured [22].
Analytics is a promising direction of future development. As Zimmermann et al. pro-posed, location of defects (”ticket sector”) and generic properties of fixed bugs (”issue”) provide the ground for constructing expert system that could potentially predict these properties of new submitted ticket according to previous ones, or automatically send ap-propriate follow-up questions to customers. It will require intensive studies of machine learning models, and extensive practical use of the system to feed sufficient data to these models [24].
Feedback from usability test sessions also gives some useful suggestions for development.
The conversation between company staff only takes place within workgroup, but there is demand of secret conversation between CS agents in ticket scope. It would be relevant to organize a conversation for a ticket in a workgroup, whereas ticket conversation is exposed to customer too, therefore none is a suitable way to communicate between peers about a ticket. Moreover, yet the UI maneuvers are quite straight and clear, the terms are very confusing, hence there shall be some instructions and help sections inside the UI. From manager’s perspective, it would be valuable to put some time-related properties around task and ticket, as it can be used to measure work productivity. Lastly, extended features are needed to affiliate the product with Agile project management.
5 CONCLUSION
Through the representation of results, it is reasonable to state that this thesis work has met its initial objectives. Below are the set of research questions with respective answers to support the statement.
RQ1:Which coordination problems currently exist in software companies?
Software companies, particularly small ones in this case, undertake the following prob-lems in their coordination [4] [5]:
• Traceability of customer issues and tasks is little or not at all.
• Information is distributed on too many channels, lack of centralizing causes waste of time to spread the information to relevant people.
• Lack of standardized work process causes the company struggle with expanding amount of customers.
• Turnover leads to additional cost of training new CS agent to deal with customers.
• Recurring issues may appear multiple times unnoticed, implying hidden fragilities in existing software system.
RQ2: How can these problems be solved with an improved collaborative software plat-form?
The product of this thesis acts as an issue tracking system to improve collaboration with customers and coordination between team members. As previously emphasized in Chap-ter 3, it was implemented with a combination of principles by Gerson, Zimmermann et al. [22] [24].
• Easier customization: Flexibility in utilizing ”ticket sector” and ”issue” to catego-rize tickets. Through these, the product attempts to engage local business experts to tailor the products into their use. In this case company - a startup that sells call center software, their local experts will know which frequent problems are around to drive the system into this particular domain, a changing circumstance in another local company can still take the product into viable use with this flexibility.
• Easier reconciliation: The organizing of workgroup and ticket facilitates more engagement from stakeholders of the system. Information shared through tickets and conversations offers more participant review and collective decision.
• Collecting information that developers use to find the location of a defect: The use of ”ticket sector” entity currently regards the component involved to resolve the reported ticket, and its properties are quite minimal at the moment so it can still be tailored according to different business uses.
• Collecting generic information for a large number of fixed bugs:The use of ”is-sue” entity labels heuristically accumulated previous tickets. This also attempts to facilitate the above problems about training document and recognition of recurring bugs.
In addition to the artifact itself, the thesis work also contributes tometawork- coined by Gerson to refer the work of making work go well [22]. This thesis work offers the most in standardizing, namely homogenizing diverse tickets to repeated similarities. The re-spective standardized work process can augment the segregation, which includes splitting a task into smaller ones. The use of this web application enables standardized proto-cols to support coordination among those tasks. Furthermore, knowledge management, which has been one major focus of CSCW, is also taken in high regard. As mentioned in Requirements Analysis section, the product’s central vision is to innovate the teamwork synergy and customer support by establishing better knowledge management platform.
Nevertheless, this software artifact is only one half of the big picture. As Schmidt and Simonee argues, the work of using it properly constitutes the other half to reduce the com-plexity of articulation work in organizational settings, therefore this product also comes with respective managerial and practical implications reciprocally [44]. There are un-derlying challenges to train employees to make use of such system, and overcome the tendency of skipping practices and resistance to changes. On social aspects, organiza-tional culture should promote discovery and innovation. Establishing such a culture so that members are willing to give and embrace knowledge is politically tricky, as some may object to sharing, higher-status ones often express their supremacy over lesser ones, and there is lack of motivation to share [45].
There are also several research ideas as continuation of this work. As discussed, it is possible to study models and build an expert system onwards thanks to the operational data gathered [24]. Besides, this collaborative system may expand its interest in agile project management. Further developments on functional project management features
can bring about new models for analyzing and organizing project work. This trend is very important as the world is welcoming distributed software development, which requires more rigid but effective coordination methods [46].
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Table A1.1.Use-case: Manage customer
Description Employee can create, view, modify customer, who is a client of the product provided by the company
Priority High
General Flow Employee choose Customer in navigation bar. The system redirects Employee to Customer management view. Here Employee can view the list of customers.
Use can fill in a form to add a new customer. Clicking a customer item will redirect user to its detailed view.
In detailed view, there is update form to edit informa-tion of customer and list of their associated tickets Preconditions / Requirements Employee has already signed in with their provided
account
Customer creating and updating forms must be vali-dated
When Employee chooses to delete a customer, all rel-evant information and tickets are deleted as well Customer information matches their appropriate Guest account
(continues)
Table A1.2.Use-case: Manage ticket
Description Employee can create, view, modify ticket, which is a reported bug or request from customer
Priority High
Basic Flow Employee choose Ticket in navigation bar. The sys-tem redirects Employee to Ticket management view.
Here Employee can view the list of tickets, create new one, read contents, add new comments, and make modifications to each
Alternative Flow Employee can access to a list of tickets filtered by their customer, in customer details management view Guest can submit their own ticket to the system in their own view, which is separate from dashboard for Employee
Preconditions / Requirements Employee has already signed in with their provided account
Guest has already signed in with their guest account Each ticket must associate to one sole customer Ticket management forms must be validated Guest can only view their own tickets
Guest can create, but cannot update their ticket infor-mation
Guest can only view limited information of their own tickets
Table A1.3.Use-case: Comment on ticket
Description Employee can make comment on ticket to communi-cate with customer who has made this request previ-ously
Priority High
Basic Flow In Ticket list view, Employee can click on one to get directed to Ticket details view, then fill in reply form and send comment
Alternative Flow Ticket list is also available in Customer details view, Employee can click on one to get directed to Ticket details view, then fill in reply form and send comment Guest can click on one ticket in their view to get di-rected to Ticket details view, then fill in reply form and send comment
Preconditions / Requirements Employee has already signed in with their provided account
Employee can only comment on tickets which are not closed yet
Guest can only comment on their own tickets which are not closed yet
(continues)
Table A1.4.Use-case: Manage workgroup
Description Employee can create, view, modify workgroup in their organization. Each workgroup includes mem-bers, conversations and tasks
Priority High
General Flow Employee choose Workgroup in navigation bar. The system redirects Employee to Workgroup manage-ment view. Here Employee can view the list of work-groups. Employee clicks on a create button, fills in form to create a new workgroup. Employee clicks a single workgroup to view its details. In workgroup details view, Employee can edit its description, add or remove members by filling respective forms
Preconditions / Requirements Employee has already signed in with their provided account
When creating workgroup, it must have at least 1 member in addition to its creator
Forms in workgroup management must be validated Only creator can update workgroup information Only creator can remove members from workgroup Only Employee with membership can add members into workgroup
Only Employee with membership can view list of Tasks and Conversations
(continues)
Table A1.5.Use-case: Manage conversation
Description Employee can create, view, modify conversation, which is about a relevant topic
Priority High
General Flow Employee can access to a list of conversations in Workgroup details view. Here Employee can view the list of conversations. Employee can fill in a form to create a new conversation. Clicking a conversation item will redirect Employee to its detailed view Preconditions / Requirements Employee has already signed in with their provided
account
Each conversation must belong to one sole workgroup Creating conversation form must be validated
Only Employee with membership can view list of conversations in workgroup, and create new one
Table A1.6.Use-case: Comment on conversation
Description Employee can make comment on conversation to communicate with other workgroup members and ex-change information
Priority High
General Flow Conversation list is available in Workgroup details view, Employee can click on one to get directed to Ticket details view, then fill in reply form and send comment
Preconditions / Requirements Employee has already signed in with their provided account
Employee can only comment on conversation of workgroups they have membership
(continues)
Table A1.7.Use-case: Manage task
Description Employee can create, view, modify tasks within workgroup
Priority High
General Flow Employee can access to a list of tasks in Workgroup details view. Here Employee can view the list of tasks. Employee can fill in a form to create a new task. Clicking a task item will redirect Employee to its detailed view
Preconditions / Requirements Employee has already signed in with their provided account
Each task must belong to one sole workgroup Each task can only have one assignee at most
A task can be a parent of multiple children tasks, while a task can be a child of at most one parent task Task management forms must be validated
Only Employee with membership can view list of tasks in workgroup, and create new one
Table A1.8.Use-case: Manage issue
Description Manager can create, view, modify issue - whose con-tent can label, raise awareness of problem essence and how to deal with it
Priority High
General Flow Manager choose Issue in navigation bar. The system redirects Manager to Issue management view. Here Manager can view the list of issues. Manager clicks create button, fills in form to create a new issue. Man-ager clicks a item to view its details, and can also edit its information by submitting a form
Preconditions / Requirements Manager has already signed in with their provided ac-count
Issue creating and updating forms must be validated Staff can still view but cannot add or edit any issue information
(continues)
Table A1.9.Use-case: Manage ticket sector
Description Manager can create, view, modify ticket sector -whose content helps determine the company’s respon-sible organizational department or related software product component
Priority High
General Flow Manager choose Ticket Sector in navigation bar. The system redirects Manager to Ticket Sector manage-ment view. Here Manager can view the list of sectors.
Manager clicks create button, fills in form to create a new sector. Manager clicks a item to view its details, and can also edit its information by submitting a form Preconditions / Requirements Manager has already signed in with their provided
ac-count
Ticket sector creating and updating forms must be val-idated
Staff can still view but cannot add or edit any ticket sector information
(continues)
Table A1.10. Use-case: Update profile
Description Edit information of the currently logged in user
Priority Low
Basic Flow Employee can choose an option on menu to redirect to their profile view. Here they can view their basic information, update them, and can also change their password
Alternative Flow After logging in, Guest is by default redirected to their profile view. Here they can view their basic informa-tion, update them, and change their password. Their basic information will match the respective customer
Alternative Flow After logging in, Guest is by default redirected to their profile view. Here they can view their basic informa-tion, update them, and change their password. Their basic information will match the respective customer