Assignment 2: Design a Telepresence Interaction
The objective for this assignment is to explore and design the framework for social interactions around telepresence needs for collaborative software development as would be found in distributed agile teams.
Background
An increasing number of software teams are adopting agile practices in order to increase productivity and consequently increase the speed at which project get completed. An important practice of agile teams is co-location, which means that the entire team works together in a single physical area, such as a room. These collaborative workspaces increase communication, learning, and lead to quicker resolution of issues and therefore increased productivity. However, this does not work in many organizations that have a global presence and therefore have distributed teams that must collaborate virtually. For those teams, a virtual collaborative workspace (virtual co-location) must be created. This assignment looks at what such a virtual collaborative workspace would need to look like to foster the same kind of interaction that occurs in a physically co-located team.
Detailed Instructions
- Investigate the kinds of interactions that occur in development teams. What does a typical "conversation" look like? What are the communication needs of the different team members?
- Evaluate the use of conferencing platforms to address the need for virtual co-location. Choose and evaluate in detail one platform. Examples of such platforms are FuzeMeeting, Elluminate, Skype, iMeet, Yugma, DimDim, among others. Do they address the needs of the different team members? What needs do they not address? Do they work better or equal to face-to-face interactions? What is missing compared to f2f interactions? Does the user interfaces for the platform work? Where does the user interface fall short.
- Design a full virtual collaborative workspace with full "tele-presence", such as HyperMirror or BiReality. Could this be implemented with existing technology and would it address the interaction needs of the different team members. Would it be better than a conferencing platform?
Submit this assignment as an electronic research report. You may publish your report on any web platform including Tumblr. Make sure you include diagrams, sketches, links to literature, platforms, tables, and any other visuals you need to make your conclusions understandable.
Resources Required
Total Number of Earnable Points: 80 Points
Approximate Time to Complete: 6-8 Hours
Due Date: see Syllabus or Blackboard
Due Time: At the beginning of class
Approximate Time to Complete: 6-8 Hours
Due Date: see Syllabus or Blackboard
Due Time: At the beginning of class