UC Irvine

With the development of a wide variety of collaborative software research and tools, the distributed collaboration experience has made giant strides. Today, people conduct remote collaboration on an unprecedented scale. When technologies become our only means to communicate and collaborate without being able to be in a collocated office, it is time for us to take a closer look at how well current research and technology are helping people work together. As a previous software developer who worked on collaborative software development, and a current researcher, I am curious about what features of existing collaborative software tools are actually supporting remote collaboration. To learn this end, I first examined the research literature to learn the problems that researchers are facing and solutions they came up with; second, I conducted interviews to learn about how companies are utilizing technologies to bring people together for work, and their experience of using these technologies; third, I did an internship to gather data from participant observation; and, finally, assessed my final results in discussions with other researchers.

I found that some features of collaborative software are heavily relied on in distance work, and might be continued to be used even after people return to work in collocated offices. Further, the imitation of the face-to-face experience as some software is trying to do will always be inferior to the collocated experience. Such imitation may be immediately abandoned as soon as people can work together in collocated offices. We may need to pay more attention to collaborative software features that people would still be willing to use even when collocated. I also found some features are not always working as people expected. Unveiling and understanding the occasions when technology breaks down may shed some light on future collaborative software research and tools development.