Society and organizations are undergoing a profound digital transformation, driven by emerging technological advances and new paradigms that address the growing demands of productive, commercial, service-related, and social activities. This evolution has led to the emergence of so-called Next-Generation Collaborative Environments, where providing awareness remains a critical factor for usability, efficiency and a satisfactory user experience. In this work, we analyse some significant awareness frameworks from the literature and propose a new conceptualisation tailored to these emergent environments, aimed at groupware designers. Our proposal is novel in both its scope and its non-linear approach to the awareness areas and dimensions it encompasses. This conceptual schema has been preliminarily validated through its application to the modelling of a diverse set of case studies.

The demand for programmers has grown exponentially in recent years, making programming an indispensable skill. However, the complex nature of programming poses various challenges for novice programmers, leading to high dropout rates in programming courses. The recognition of individual differences, encompassing distinct neurocognitive profiles, is acknowledged to influence the accuracy of predicting programming skill outcomes. As a result, an increasing awareness exists regarding the substantial contribution of human factors, including personality or cognitive ability, to programming performance. This study conducts a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to explore recent research on individual differentiation or programmer profiling in programming tasks. The primary goal is to examine pertinent research exploring personal characteristics’ influence on programming in various contexts. As a result of this review, a taxonomy has been introduced to enhance the comprehension of programmers’ multifaceted individual differences, categorising influential factors into nine distinct dimensions. Furthermore, it has been found that individual differences influence performance in programming tasks, as well as in the learning of this discipline. In conclusion, this SLR emphasises human factors’ critical role in programming and proposes a taxonomy that is a valuable framework for researchers, educators, and practitioners to enhance their understanding of human factors’ influence on programming performance.

Groupware technology is an essential asset for organizations and a successful medium to support social meetings and teacher-learning processes when people are geographically distributed. Computer programming is a domain that can take advantage of the Collaborative Work paradigm and of this technology. However, to be truly effective, groupware systems must provide suitable awareness support, i.e., be capable of informing users of the activity taking place and of the team outcome, so that they can build a setting for their work. The study of awareness mechanisms and their influence on collaborative programming processes is an open research question. In this context, this article contributes an experimental study to evaluate the mechanisms to support coordination, communication, and awareness of COLLECE, a distributed group programming system rich in awareness support. This study brings as a novel approach the combination of subjective and objective information sources, specifically eye tracking techniques, and incorporates a heuristic evaluation of awareness support based on a well-known framework. Thanks to this experiment, we have been able to verify that this blended approach, in which users participate intensively, provides a more comprehensive and deeper assessment of awareness and other coordination and communication mechanisms, and thus a better understanding of how their use can influence the collaborative programming process and outcome (program or piece of software). The study has revealed strengths, weaknesses and opportunities for improvement of the evaluated system, and has yielded concrete results as to which are the most useful awareness components of the user interface not related to the activity supported by the system (programming), these being the traffic lights; the easiest to use, such as the session panel; or the components that impose a greater cognitive load, such as the multi-scrollbar. Regarding the relationship between the supported awareness dimensions and the quality of the collaboration outcome (computer program), the results point to the need to adequately support the What-Artifact dimension, i.e., highlighting in which part of the shared workspace (the source code) the user with floor control is working.

Abstract The use of new technologies to assist and support the needs of people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is increasing. There is many software developments oriented toward this user collective. However, there are hardly any proposals to help developers in the process of creating these applications. In recent years, design and evaluation guidelines are emerging, but there are no approaches that facilitate and automate the generation of this type of systems. This paper proposes a framework for the design and automatic generation of cross-platform applications for ASD users. This proposal follows the Model-Driven Development paradigm, proposes a participatory design approach, and contemplates collaborative co-design phases among the main stakeholders involved (specialists, families, and ASD users). So far, this framework contemplates the development of applications to support planning and emotion recognition, but its extension to a greater number of possible activities is contemplated. The proposal has undergone a preliminary evaluation by therapists and experts in ASD, who have positively evaluated it.

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.

In the digital age, computer programming skills are in high demand, and collaborative learning is essential for its development. Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) systems enable real-time collaboration among students, regardless of their location, by offering resources and tools for programming tasks. To optimize the learning experience in CSCL systems, user profiling can be used to tailor educational content, adapt learning activities, provide personalized feedback, and facilitate targeted interventions based on individual learners' needs, preferences, and performance patterns. This paper describes a framework that can be applied to profile students of CSCL systems. By analysing log files, computational models, and quality measures, the framework captures various dimensions of the learning process and generates user profiles based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality. The work also conducts a case study that applies this framework to COLLECE 2.0, a CSCL system that supports programming learning.

Student dropout in Engineering Education is an important problem which has been studied from different perspectives, as well as using different techniques. This manuscript describes the methodology used in order to address this question in the context of learning analytics. Bayesian networks (BNs) have been used as they provide adequate methods for the representation, interpretation and contextualisation of data. The proposed approach is illustrated through a case study about Computer Science (CS) dropout at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain), which is close to 40%. To that end, several BNs were obtained from a database which contained 383 records representing both academic and social data of the students enrolled in the CS degree during four courses. Then, these probabilistic models were interpreted and evaluated. The results obtained revealed that the best model that fits the data is provided by the K2 algorithm although the great heterogeneity of the data studied did not permit the adjustment of the dropout profile of the student too accurately. Nonetheless, the methodology described here can be taken as a reference for future works.

Over the past few years, a great deal of work has been done in the field of collaborative software (groupware). Many fields of science have taken advantage of these developments, and Software Engineering is one such field. Within this scope, we have developed a domain independent synchronous collaborative tool that can be specialized to work with several types of diagrammatical domains. Among those domains, the diagrams used in the Unified Process can be found. In this paper we describe how we have specialized this tool to work with use case diagrams and how we have carried out an empirical study with this tool to obtain conclusions regarding several issues: the analysis of three kinds of communication among users, the relationship between types of communication and coordination among users, and the relationship between communication and the quality of the modeling work.

One of the most important aspects of groupware systems is the concept of awareness, which refers to the perception and knowledge of the group and its activities. This paper extends a previously developed ontology-based conceptualization for the development of user interfaces in groupware systems that support awareness. Specifically, we are interested in domain-independent design groupware. We propose an awareness ontology that conceptualizes the most important aspects of awareness in such systems and can be used to automatize the development of their user interfaces. In order to validate the usefulness of this ontology, we have related the concepts included in our ontology to the awareness dimensions exposed in a well-known awareness framework.

In this paper we propose a conceptual framework for the design the groupware user interface. It supports the interface design enabling integration with software development processes through UML notation. We studied relevant proposals in the domain of CSCW and HCI. Taxonomy is defined in order to classify concepts from those proposals. Finally, the taxonomy is populated for defining main concepts of the conceptual framework.

The standardization of elearning environments and the design of collaboration scripts are two research areas that are acquiring a greater attention within the computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) community. We are interested in the suitability of the standard IMS-LD for modeling collaborative learning processes. We propose a reference model and the use of a graphical notation called CIAN as CSCL scripting language. Using these specifications of a high level of abstraction and mappable to a computer-interpretable notation such as IMS-LD, allows hiding the particularities of the standard to instructional designers.

In the last years there has been a high production of groupware systems. However, most of these systems have been based on the desktop metaphor. We propose a translation process based on the use of the conceptual model (or, particularly, on the task model and the data model) of the original application. From this model and by means of a pattern-based reengineering process, we obtain mobile versions of the original systems. In this paper the user interface reengineering process is described and an example of the application of patterns for the evolution of a specific system, Domosim-TPC, is shown