HCC: Large: Collaborative Research: Large-Scale Human-Centered Coordination Systems to Support Interdependent Tasks in Context

面对今天需要的大规模软件密集型系统，现代开发环境显著地失败了，通常会导致信息过载，无法处理系统和开发它们的组织的高度动态特性，以及无法支持跨组织边界的协作。这个项目的首要目标是为以人为中心的环境提供科学基础，使大规模和分布式的项目意识、沟通和协调像在小团队中一样轻松。它通过(a)对现实世界的大规模高复杂性软件项目进行实证研究，以了解任务协调是如何在组织环境中发生并对其做出贡献的，(b)发展了一个在环境中协调的基础理论，这将激励和指导(c)设计新的协调技术，明确地解决信息过载、动态性和组织边界问题。智力价值：该研究将产生四个贡献：(a)一个可靠的理论基础，捕捉任务协调和组织环境如何在规模上相互作用；(b)理论驱动的情境协调实证研究；(c)关于如何提高生产力、质量和开发速度的知识；(d)一套用于大规模协作的设计原则、工具原型和交互技术。这些结果将通过明确地解决规模问题，从团队内部的协调转变为跨许多开发人员、跨许多团队、跨多个地理和组织边界的协调，从而改变协调技术的前景。更广泛的影响：随着社会进入“超大规模”软件密集型系统时代，这种规模的协调是一个主要的未解决问题，持续阻碍医疗保健、安全、国防、电子政务和能源等重要领域的发展和进步。该项目的成果不仅将提供重大的经济效益，而且还将以现在可以开发的新系统的形式提供重大的社会效益。通过与行业伙伴的密切合作，这些成果将很快被应用到实践中。该项目还将通过讲习班和指导活动增加妇女对计算机科学的参与。

In the face of the vast scale of software-intensive systems needed today, modern development environments fail dramatically, typically leading to information overload, an inability to deal with the highly dynamic nature of both the systems and the organizations that develop them, and failure to support collaboration across organizational boundaries. The overarching aim of this project is to provide a scientific foundation for human-centered environments that make large-scale and distributed project awareness, communication, and coordination as effortless as in a small team. It accomplishes this by (a) performing empirical studies of real-world large-scale high-complexity software projects to understand how task coordination occurs in and contributes to organizational context, (b) developing an underlying theory of coordination in context, which will motivate and guide (c) the design of new coordination technology that explicitly addresses information overload, dynamism, and organizational boundaries. Intellectual merit: The research will result in four contributions: (a) a sound theoretical basis that captures how task coordination and organizational context interplay at scale; (b) theory-driven empirical studies of in-context coordination; (c) knowledge about how to achieve improvements in productivity, quality, and development speed; and (d) a suite of design principles, tool prototypes, and interaction techniques for collaboration at a very large scale. These outcomes will transform the landscape of coordination technology by squarely addressing the issue of scale, moving from coordination within a team to coordination across many developers, across many teams, and across multiple geographical and organizational boundaries.Broader Impacts: As society enters the era of "ultra large scale" software-intensive systems, coordination at such scales is a major unsolved problem, persistently hampering development and advances in vital domains such as healthcare, security, defense, eGovernment, and energy. The outcomes of this project will not only provide major economic benefits, but also major societal benefits in the form of the new systems that now can be developed. Through close collaboration with industry partners, the results will quickly find their way into practice. The project will also increase involvement of women in computer science through workshops and mentoring activities.