This site hosts the Supplementary Online Material
for our ECSA 2019 Submission.


Abstract

Collective Intelligence Systems (CIS), such as wikis and social networks, enable enhanced knowledge creation and sharing at organization and society levels. From our experience in R&D projects with industry partners and in-house CIS development, we learned that these platforms go through a complex evolution process. A particularly challenging aspect in this respect represents uncertainties that can appear at any time in the life-cycle of such systems. A prominent way to deal with uncertainties is adaptation, i.e., the ability to adjust or reconfigure the system in order to mitigate the uncertainties. However, there is currently a lack of consolidated design knowledge of CIS-specific adaptation and methods for managing it. To support software architects, we contribute an architecture viewpoint for continuous adaptation management in CIS, aligned with ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010. We evaluated the viewpoint in a case study with a group of eight experienced engineers. The results show that the viewpoint is well-structured, useful and applicable, and that its model kinds cover well the scope to handle different CIS-specific adaptation problems.

Supplementary Material

The supplementary material on this site intends to provide the interested reader with a more detailed insight into the results of our research activities.


Research Question

What are architectural principles to handle CIS-specific adaptation along its life-cycle and how can we codify these principles in a systematic way to make them useful and applicable for software architects?


Applied Research Method

Applied research method



Data Collection

Survey of Existing Collective Intelligence Systems
This document gives an overview of the conducted survey of existing CIS on the web to identify if CIS-specific adaptation is a concern and what kind of adaptation is handled at the moment in CIS in different application contexts.

Alexa Top 500 Ranking used for the Survey

Guidelines for Semi-Structured Interviews with Technical Stakeholders
This document contains the interview guidelines used for interviews with technical stakeholders from different companies and organizations that operate a CIS platform. The findings of the interviews confirmed and complemented the previous results from the survey. We investigated how designing and planning CIS-specific adaptability in different phases of the system's life-cycle is currently managed. The results revealed the different phases of the CIS life-cycle, in particular the characteristic activity levels. In addition, we obtained knowledge about involved stakeholders and CIS-specific adaptation concerns, rationales for adaptation design, and life-cycle aspects.

Development of Pilot CIS
In addition, we obtained knowledge from experiences with managing CIS-specific adaptation in two existing in-house pilot CIS, e.g., the Scientific Glossary Platform for our research lab.

Running instance of Scientific Glossary Platform in the CDL-SQI


Synthesis

Architecture Viewpoint Description
This document contains the description of the architecture viewpoint for continuous adaptation management in collective intelligence systems (CIS-ADAPT), comprising overview, stakeholders, framed concerns, model kinds and their metamodels, and analysis.


Evaluation

Case Study Material

To evaluate the usefulness and applicability of the proposed CIS-ADAPT viewpoint, we performed a case study with a group of eight experienced engineers. It was organized as a 6-hours session at TU Wien, Austria.
In the case study the participants were instructed to apply the architecture viewpoint in three adaptation-related design tasks addressing CIS key elements of a given scenario.

Case Study Protocol
This document contains the protocol for the case study describing the research questions, study design and setting, participants, data collection and analysis methods, reporting strategy, and threats to validity.

Overview of the study session and its procedure
Description of CIS scenario and design tasks
Photo of a study session and its setting

Data Collection

Pre-Survey
This document contains the pre-survey to gather background information of the participants.

Post-Survey
This document contains the post-survey which we asked the participants to complete to assess the usefulness, applicability and understandability of the CIS-ADAPT viewpoint and its model kinds that they applied for performing the design tasks.

Guidelines for Semi-Structured Interviews
This document contains the interview guidelines used for short interviews with the participants to collect data about their experiences and challenges during the application of the viewpoint.