Modeling Awareness Requirements in Groupware: From Cards to Diagrams

Up to now, groupware has enjoyed a certain stability in terms of the users' technical requirements, being the awareness dimension one of its key services to provide usability and improve collaboration. Nonetheless, currently, groupware technologies are being stressed: on the one hand, the pandemic of COVID-19 has greatly driven the massive use of groupware tools to overcome physical distancing; on the other hand, the new digital worlds (with disruptive devices, changing paradigms, and growing productive needs) are introducing new collaboration settings. This, and the fact that software engineering methods are not paying enough attention to the awareness, makes us concentrate on facilitating its design. Thus, we have created a visual modeling technique, based on a conceptual framework, to be used by the developers of groupware systems to describe awareness requirements. This visual language, called the awareness description diagrams, has been validated in some experimental activities. The results obtained show that this is a valid technique in order to model the awareness support, that it is useful and understandable for groupware engineers, and that the visual representation is preferred to a more textual one in terms of expressiveness.