International Journal of Computer Trends and Technology (IJCTT) volume 4 Issue 9 Sep 2013

ISSN: 2231-2803 http://www.ijcttjournal.org Page3375

Whose Actions To Be Monitored? And To Whom
Should I Display My Actions In Acquaintance
Network
G. Bala Mahesh Chandra
#1
, Dr. Subhash Chandra
*2

1
pursuing M.Tech, from Holy Mary Institute of Technology and Science (HITS), Hyderabad, Affiliated to JNTU-Hyderabad.
2
working as a Principal at Holy Mary Institute of Technology and Science (HITS), Hyderabad, Affiliated to JNTU-
Hyderabad.

Abstract the concept of information has come to play a central
role in computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) research.
The coordinative experiments of displaying and monitoring have
received attention and have led to different place of research,
from calculation tool to support, such as media spaces and event
generation mechanisms, to ethnographic application of the work.
However, these applications have overlooked a different aspect of
information practices: the identification of the social actors who
should be control and the actors to whom their actions should be
visible. The focus of this paper is on how social actors answer the
following questions: to whom should I visible my actions? And,
whose user actions should I monitor? Ethnographic information
from two program development teams is used to answer these
questions. In addition, we represent how program developers
work practices are influenced by three different factors: the
managerial setting, the age of the project, and the program
architecture.

Keywords Computer-supported coordinated work,
organizational management and coordination, programming
environments.

I. INTRODUCTION
Schmidt (2002) discusses some important findings about the
concept of information recognized by the Computer
Supported Coordinated Work (CSCW) community. These
findings are based on seminal application of work practice
(Harper, Hughes et al. 1989; Heath and Luff 1992; Heath,
Jirotka et al. 1993), and they conceptualize information as a
range of coordinative practices performed by competent actors
to accomplish their work (Heath, Svensson et al. 2002). The
nature of these coordinative practices is dual: it involves
(i) displaying ones actions, and (ii) monitoring others user
actions. That is why to say, social actors monitor their
accomplice actions to grasp how these actions impact their
individual work and, while doing their work, the social actors
display their actions in such a way that others can easily
maintain them. The displaying and the monitoring of activities
are thus complementary aspects: the displaying of ones
actions is facilitated by the monitoring of the others and vice
versa.

Despite the undeniable importance of these findings, one
aspect has not received enough analytical attention by the
Computer Supported Coordinated Work community the
identification of social factors involved in the coordinative
practices of information, that is, how social actors identify the
colleagues who should be control and those colleagues to
whomtheir actions should be visible. We argue that a change
of focus is required: instead of focusing on the coordinative
practices, one should focus on how social actors answer the
following questions: to whomshould I visible my actions?
And also, whose actions should I monitor? It is also necessary
to grasp how the organizational setting facilitates the
identification of these two sets of actors.

Empirical application, however, have not focused on these
aspects, partly because the application of work practice that
helped to establish the concept of information used the aspect
of et hno methodology and conversation analysis (Garfinkel
1967). Application using these aspects focused on the
organization of the work in small time frames, accordingly,
the social actors did not modified. The settings studied
(control rooms, newsrooms, trading rooms, etc.) required
individuals to monitor their accomplice immediate actions at
the same time they were engaged in other activities (Heath,
Svenss on et al. 2002). Note that this is not a criticismof these
sociological aspects; rather, it is an observation that this focus
has led CSCW researchers to overlook other aspects of
information, as discussed further in this paper.


International Journal of Computer Trends and Technology (IJCTT) volume 4 Issue 9 Sep 2013


ISSN: 2231-2803 http://www.ijcttjournal.org Page3376

II. RELATED WORK
BACKGROUND ON INFORMATION IN CSCW
RESEARCH

Examining information in more depth and based on
previous research on CSCW quickly reveals the many
different ways information has been used. Schmidt elaborated
but a quick look of some useful terms in basic requirements
and daily life. After that he explained information to work
practice and from the concept of information as a limited
practices done by competitive actors to complete their work.
These coordinative practices play a key role when competitors
make their work. That means information is a property of
competition, no need to see it as separate fromit. Schmidt
clearly concluded his explanation as doing one thing while
taking heed of other relevant occurrences are not two parallel
lines of action but a specific way of pursuing a line of the
action, namely to do it correctly, competently, mindfully,
accountably.

Here in this, According to the Schmidt, these all the work
practices are not viewed by researchers as the result of
deliberate, outside actions; but he counters that this should not
be the case because social actors definitely choose the termof
obtrusiveness of their actions.

So no clear differentiation is exists between, on the one
side, the coordinative practices of maintaining and visible,
normally referred to under the labels mutual information or
peripheral information, and, on the other side, the practices
of directing attention or involving for other purposes. Let we
discuss the fact, by somehow displaying his or his/her actions,
the actor is always, in some way and to some term, intending
some effect on the activities of others. The differentiation is
not divided but merely one of terms and modes of
obtrusiveness.

In order to discuss this, while information is usually
has been connects with actors achievements, this is not
always correct: Because checking a tool called log, sending an
email to actors, or starting a conversation are all correct
examples of work practices definitely used by social actors to
become aware of their accomplice actions. Sudhir calls this
approach absolute obtrusive.

So Based on these all observing about information, Schmidt
introduces proposes a set of important research questions to be
studied. As an example showing, he asks the following rules,
so here the first rule is: which competencies are co-operating
actors able to make sense of what others actors are doing?
And the second one is: How does the actor determine what is
relevant to his or her individual effort? While the re-search
questions are raised by Schmidt are very regular to both
CSCW and ProgramEngineering (SE). Pair of questions is not
addressed by Schmidt is the following:

How do social actors determine to whom should they
display their user actions? And, whose actions should they
monitor?

All these questions are exactly the questions what we
address in this paper. They have not received enough
analytical attention in general, either by the Program
Engineering or CSCW research communities. To some term,
all they have been hinted at froma technological point of
view, Let us take an example, in every event notification
servers, usually through subscriptions that allow one to define
the notifications to receive. To establish the concept of
information focused on the organization of the work in
settings with specific features: there was a strict division of
labor, all the actors were physically collected, and work tasks
required coordination and were highly interdependent.

SOME OF THE METHODS AND SITES OF RESEARCH

Here we conduct the three qualitative application at
two different large programdevelopment organizations. The
first study was conducted during the summer time in the year
2002, and the second was performed during the summer time
in the year 2003, and the final one was performed during the
summer in the 2004. The main role of the program
architecture in the programdevelopers work practices was
evident during the three different data collections; therefore,
we externally tried to collect information about this aspect.
Details about each teamas well as the methods used to collect
data with each teamare described next. Then, we describe the
how our data analysis was performed.

Beta Approach

Here the second one was conducted in a program
development company named BSC. The project studied,
called Beta, it is responsible for developing a client-server
application. And the total project staff includes 57 program
engineers, UI (User Interface) designers, programarchitects,
and managers, all are divided into five different teams, each
one is developing a different part of the application in the
every program field so that each and every team in the
International Journal of Computer Trends and Technology (IJCTT) volume 4 Issue 9 Sep 2013


ISSN: 2231-2803 http://www.ijcttjournal.org Page3377

programindustry knows the process of developing a program
application.
Alpha Approach

In this case, the first teamhas developed a program
application called Alpha (it is not the real name of the
application), and that programwas composed of ten different
tools in approximately one million lines of C and C++code.
Each one of these tools uses a specific set of processes. A
process for the Alpha teamis a programthat runs with the
appropriate run-time options and it is not formally related to
the concept of processes in the operating systems and
distributed computing systems. Here running a tool means
running the processes those are required by this tool with their
appropriate run-time options. And these processes are used to
divide the work: Process leaders and process developers,
usually work with only one process.

Gamma Approach

In this we should have to know about the third team, Gamma,
it was mainly responsible for developing an application called
mobile application. In fact, this application was a mobile
version of the application developed by the Beta team.
Because of that, the gamma developers wanted to use, as
much as possible, so the Beta expert-code, but this was not
always possible because of hardware problems in the mobile
device they were targeting. Gamma and Beta were part of the
same organization to develop the mobile applications.

Analysis of the data

Here in this all of the data that was not already text was
transformed into text for analysis. Let we consider an example
like, interviews and handwritten field notes were transcribed
into text. The complete data was input into a programtool for
qualitative data analysis. After that, we used coding
techniques to make sense of the data we collected: interviews
and field notes were coded to identify the categories that were
later interconnected with other categories. Using this model,
we can identified the concept of the information network the
network of the actors whose actions are need to be maintained
by an actor and those to whomthis actor needs to make his or
her individual actions visible, and reported our first results in.
Later, the third dataset, i.e., Gamma, was integrated into the
same set of categories and relationships already identified in
order to further investigate the information network concept.


THE INFORMATION NETWORK IN THE ALPHA
APPROACH

In this the Alpha approach/programneed to be associated with
a problemreport (PR). Among other pieces of information, a
problem report describes many changes in the code, and the
reason for the changes (error modifying, enhancement, and
etc.), and who made the changes. An Alpha approach
developer is delegated new tasks by being assigned to work
with one or more problemreports (PRs). All these PRs are
reported by other teamdivision. Whoever is filling in the PR
is responsible for filling in the field how to repeat, which
describes the circumstances (data, tools, and their parameters)
under which the problemappeared. When programdevelopers
are report a PR, they also divide a PR into multiple PRs that
achieve the same milestone. This the division shows to
facilitate the organization of the changes in the expert code,
separating PRs that affect the released Alpha tools fromthose
PRs that affect tools or processes not yet released fromthe
company.

THE RELATIVE CONCEPT OF NETWORK IN THE BETA
APPROACH

As we mentioned previously, the applications developed
in the BSC organization should be designed according to a
reference architecture based on the layers and Application
Programmable Interfaces (APIs), so that the components in
one layer could request services only for components in the
layers immediately below themthrough the services specified
in the APIs. By using this approach, we changes in the one
component could be performed more easily because the
impact of these changes is restricted to a predefined set of
program components. In addition to that, changes in the
internal details of the component can be performed without
affecting this components clients. As a consequence of this
approach, it is not required to broadcast changes to several
different programdevelopers, but instead just to a small set of
them. That is, by de-coupling the programcomponents, it is
possible to facilitate the co-ordination of the developers
working with these components in the field of program.

THE RELATIVE CONCEPT OF NETWORK IN THE
GAMMA APPROACH

As we mentioned previously, the Gamma and the Beta
approaches were part of the BSC Company. However, in
contrast to the Beta team, the Gamma team did not have
reference architecture to comply with because its application
was targeted to a mobile device with severe reexpert
constraints. BSCs reference architecture aims at client server
applications. Accordingly, APIs in the Gamma teamwere not
as relevant as in the Beta approach froman architectural point
of view. More, APIs in the Gamma team were not team
boundaries, as they were in the Beta team, that is, the API
International Journal of Computer Trends and Technology (IJCTT) volume 4 Issue 9 Sep 2013


ISSN: 2231-2803 http://www.ijcttjournal.org Page3378

boundaries were not aligned with organizational boundaries.
Therefore, the application programmable interface design
review meetings and other application programmable interface
-related problems were not as correct. A Gamma program
developer located in Taipei, who was using reexperts froman
(Application programmable interface) API.

DISCUSSION ABOUT THE PAPER

ON THE BRIEF CONCEPT OF INFORMATION

It is very important to point out that the concept of
information has occurred some argument within the computer
supported coordinated work community, with some
researchers arguing that it has been more noxious than useful.
As we noted in the introduction, a large data of previous work
has identified the description proposed by danish, which gives
a context for yours personal activity. This activity has been
merged in such a way that the information is then decreased to
simply data that is shared among social users. Based on such a
conceptualization, some researchers have created
classifications of types of data that are useful in maintaining
information. Such allocations benefit designers interested in
providing tool support for combining activities. For example,
an event notification server allows only one actor to subscribe
to the information or data that he or she is interested in getting,
while other data experts provide information that it is sent to
this server. In other way, this model is based on two
assumptions. The first assumption is that social actors actively
subscribe to information that is relevant for them. The second
is that one knows which information experts should gives
information to those interested users.

INFORMATION AND SOCIO-TECHNICAL
CONFORMATION

In recently, the socio-technical conformation approach has
gained attention in the literature of combining application
development. Conformation is based on a match between the
coordination requirements rooted by the stability among the
tasks and the actual coordination activities carried out by
personal, these total activities are associated with
communication. We believe the concept of information and
findings fromprevious computer supported coordinated work
community research can be light into interesting aspects of the
concept of conformation in this new framework.


THE FACILITY OF THE INFORMATION NETWORKS

As we mentioned previously, the concept of information is
associated with the work practices used by competent social
actors to grasp the state of their accomplice work and to
successfully coordinate their work. Based on our ethnographic
information, we represent different approaches used by
programdevelopers to find out about that, including writing
and reading e-mails (Alpha team), following stability (Beta
team), reading (Beta team) and writing (Gamma team)
information into databases, among others. It is worth noting
that information networks.

CONCLUSION

In the field of Computer-Supported Coordinated Work, the
terminformation is used to describe a range of work practices
by which social actors coordinate their work through (i) the
display of their actions to their colleagues, and (ii) the
monitoring of actions fromtheir colleagues. Recently, this
concept has been explored by program engineering
researchers in the design of combining programdevelopment
tools. Most empirical application related to information focus
on the identification of these coordinative practices and
assume settings in which the social actors who display and
monitor actions do not change often. However, the practices
of displaying and monitoring actions associated with
information are useful only to the extent that social actors
know who they should monitor and to whom they should
display their actions. In collocated settings, this information is
intrinsic. However, there are settings where this information is
not as clear, e.g., distributed program projects. Previous
applications have largely overlooked the identification of
these actors. Accordingly, this paper focuses on the program
developers work practices necessary to identify the list of
actors whose actions should be control and to whomactions
should be visible. We call this set of actors the information
network. In shifting the focus, it is possible to observe a
myriad of such practices, how they are influenced by the work
setting (organization, programarchitecture, etc), the problems
that arise when this identification is problematic, and, finally,
programdevelopers concern with the management of these
networks.

REFERENCES

1) M.S. Ackerman, et al., Who's There? The Knowledge
Mapping Approximation Project, in Sharing Expertise:
Beyond Knowledge Management, Ackerman, M.S., V. Pipek,
and V. Wulf, Editors. 2002, MIT Press.




2) J. van Hillegersberg, Amrit, C. and, Detecting Coordination
Problems in Combining ProgramDevelopment Environments.
Information Systems Management, 2008. 25: p. 57-70.
International Journal of Computer Trends and Technology (IJCTT) volume 4 Issue 9 Sep 2013


ISSN: 2231-2803 http://www.ijcttjournal.org Page3379


3) Bentley, R., et al. Ethnographically-informed systems
design for air traffic control. in ACM Conference on
Computer Supported Coordinated Work. 1992. Toronto,
Ontario, Canada: ACM Press.

AUTHORS PROFILE


G. Bala Mahesh Chandra,
Pursuing M.Tech fromHoly
Mary Institute of Technology
and Science, Keesara,
Hyderabad, Affiliated to
JNTU-Hyderabad.



Dr. Subhash Chandra is
working as a Principal at
Holy Mary Institute of
Technology and Science,
Keesara, Hyderabad,
Affiliated to JNTU-
Hyderabad.