CHI 2004
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Workshop
24-29 April
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Vienna, Austria
Identifying Gaps between HCI, Software Engineering, and Design, and Boundary Objects to Bridge Them Bonnie E. John HCI Institute Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 +1 412-268-7182
[email protected]
Len Bass Software Engineering Institute Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 +1 412-268-6763
[email protected]
Rick Kazman Software Engineering Institute Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 +1 412-268-6763
[email protected]
ACM Classification Keywords
Eugene Chen Aaron Marcus and Associates, Inc. 1196 Euclid Avenue, Suite 1F Berkeley, CA 94708 +1 510-601-0994 eugene.chen @amanda.com
(1) cooperate without having good models of each other’s work; (2) successfully work together while employing different units of analysis, methods of aggregating data, and different abstractions of data; (3) cooperate while having different goals, time horizons, and audiences to satisfy. [8, pg. 46]
D.2.2 [Software Engineering]: Design Tools & Techniques BRINGING HCI, SOFTWARE ENGINEEERING, AND DESIGN TOGETHER
In the past few years, practitioners and researchers in software engineering (SE) and the usability portion of HCI have begun to bring these two disciplines together in many venues. Aiming to “bridge the gaps” between these two disciplines, there have been workshops (e.g., ICSE 2003 [6], INTERACT 2003 [5]), special sessions at conferences (e.g., HCI International 2003 [3, 4]), and special issues of journals (e.g., Software Process: Improvement and Practice[7]). This workshop aims to continue this important activity, by bringing this topic to CHI where it can expand to include researchers and practitioners in all aspects of user-interface development (UID), e.g, visual design, interaction design, metaphor design, navigation design, and mental model design, as well as usability and SE.
The reader may immediately recognize the similarity between that description and the gaps which exist between SE and HCI… …Star suggested that in the activity she observed it was the boundary objects that made cooperation possible. Boundary objects are “objects that are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites,” [17, pg. 46] and that they sit “in the middle of a group of actors with divergent viewpoints” [9, p. 94] Boundary objects proved to be a unifying theme, used by all the participants in the ICSE workshop to shape their thoughts about bridges between HCI and SE. In addition, boundary objects is not a new concept in HCI, but has appeared in studies of work practice in such HCI authors as Ackerman [1] and Fischer [2]. However, the idea of analyzing and designing boundary objects to meet the needs of our own discipline is new.
WHY BOUNDARY OBJECTS?
Previous workshops and conference sessions have attacked the issues broadly. Participants identified gaps between HCI and SE processes, products, and training. They presented proposed “bridges” for these gaps and their experiences using these bridging techniques. These venues have engendered excitement and effort in many aspects of the problem of getting diverse groups to work together to create more effective interactive systems.
We believe that boundary objects easily extend to include many disciplines of user-interface development, including the analysis and design of metaphors, mental models, navigation schema, interaction, and visual/sonic/haptic appearance. Thus, they are an appropriate vehicle for interdisciplinary study. For instance, a “storyboard” can be considered a boundary object that spans these disciplines. A designer uses a storyboard to express and explore ideas in the space of presentation and navigation; a usability analyst uses the same storyboard to perform a quick-and-dirty usability test; the software engineer uses it as part of the specification of the interface code. The storyboard performs different functions for all three disciplines, yet allows them
One of the most useful concepts brought to these venues is that of boundary objects [8], introduced at the ICSE workshop by Andrew Walenstein [9]. Quoting from [9] Based on historical case studies of scientific work involving both professional scientists and amateurs, Star and her colleagues found that the participants: Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). CHI 2004, April 24–29, 2004, Vienna, Austria. ACM 1-58113-703-6/04/0004.
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CHI 2004
׀
Workshop
24-29 April
׀
Vienna, Austria
REFERENCES
all a common frame of reference when discussing an OK button in a Save dialog box.
1. Ackerman, M. S., & Halverson, C. (1999). “Organizational Memory: Processes, Boundary Objects, and Trajectories.” Proceedings of the IEEE Hawaii International Conference of System Sciences (HICSS’99), January, 1999. 2. Arias , E., & Fischer, G. (2000) Boundary objects: Their role in articulating the task at hand and making information relevant to it", International ICSC Symposium on Interactive & Collaborative Computing (ICC'2000), University of Wollongong, Australia, ICSC Academic Press, Wetaskiwin, Canada, December 2000, pp 567-574. 3. Bass, L. (2003). Bridging the Gap Between Usability and Software Engineering (invited session). Proceedings of HCI International (June 22-27, 2003, Crete, Greece). http://hcii2003.ics.forth.gr/program/Wednesday.asp 4. Gulliksen, J. Integrating User Centered Systems Design in the Software Engineering Process (invited session). Proceedings of HCI International (June 22-27, 2003, Crete, Greece). http://hcii2003.ics.forth.gr/program/Wednesday.asp 5. Harning , M. B. & Vanderdonckt , J. (2003) Closing the Gaps: Software Engineering and Human-Computer Interaction. Workshop at the Ninth IFIP TC13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (INTERACT 2003) (September 1-5, 2003 Zürich, Switzerland) http://www.interact2003.org/workshops/ws9description.html 6. Kazman, R., Bass. L, & Bosch, J. Bridging the Gaps Between Software Engineering and Human-Computer Interaction. Workshop at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2003) (May 3-10, 2003, Portland, Oregon, USA) http://www.se-hci.org/bridging/ 7. Kazman, R. & Bass. L. eds. (2003) Special Issue on Bridging the Process and Practice Gaps between Software Engineering and Human Computer Interaction, Software Process - Improvement & Practice John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 8. Star, S. L. (1989) The structure of ill-structured solutions: Boundary objects and heterogenous distributed problem solving. In M. N. Huhns and L. Gasser, editors, Distributed Artificial Intelligence 2. Morgan Kaufmann. 9. Walenstein, A. (2003) Finding boundary objects in SE and HCI: An approach through engineering-oriented design theories. Proceedings ICSE 2003 Workshop "Bridging the Gaps Between Software Engineering and Human-Computer Interaction". (May 2003, Portland Oregon, USA) pp. 12-19.
THE GOALS OF THE WORKSHOP
The goals of this workshop are to • Collect existing boundary objects and how they have served in interdisciplinary design and construction of interactive systems. Examples of successes and failures of boundary objects are equally valuable for this goal. • Identify the characteristics of boundary objects that succeed, and of those that do not succeed. • Identify gaps between UI developers and SW engineers in need of boundary objects • Propose new boundary objects for these gaps, which include the characteristics of successful boundary objects and avoid the characteristics of unsuccessful boundary objects. In addition to these content goals, the workshop participants will also construct a plan for dissemination of knowledge of boundary objects, concepts, examples, principles, and techniques of best practice. FORMAT OF THE WORKSHOP
This two day workshop took inspiration from a successful workshop at ICSE 2003 [6] run by the second two organizers and attended by the first. On the first day, workshop participants make a very short presentation of their reasons for attending the workshop, strictly limited to three slides, five minutes total. The last slide is strictly limited to answering three questions that summarize the materials and experience brought by the participant, related to this workshop’s focus. The three summarizing questions take two forms. One form is used by participants with direct experience of boundary objects; the second is used by participants who do not have direct experience but see a need for boundary objects. The questions are as follows: If the participant has direct experience: 1. What gap does this boundary object bridge? (i.e., disciplines, point in the product development lifecycle, type of UI component) 2. What is the boundary object? 3. How has this boundary object been used in research or practice (failures are just as important as successes) If the participant has no direct experience: 1. What gap have you identified? (i.e., disciplines, point in the product development lifecycle, type of UI component) 2. What evidence do you have of this gap existing in practice? 3. What boundary object do you envision could bridge the gap? After these concrete position statements, the workshop continued with themed panel discussions and breakout sessions.
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