26 February 2011

Groupware Tools – Confluence and JIRA

Confluence is a versatile wiki-like tool mainly meant for organizations to control, maintain and exchange information. Confluence is a great way to centralize and organize the information needed and used by a large group of people. The software is used by thousands of organizations and universities worldwide.

Examples of using Confluence could be creating a new section for a new project. The section’s creator can then choose which people can see that section and which people have the right to edit or write in it. In the section, users can add pages, documents and various other elements of different forms, and they can also be structured in different kinds of ways. Users can then comment on these elements and add attachments if they feel the need to.

I have used Confluence in a software project and found it really helpful along the way. It’s great to be able to access the information from anywhere with a computer, and you can easily monitor the progress of projects even if you are away. The organized structure of documents and projects also helps, as the needed information is quickly retrieved.

Another software created by the same company, Atlassian, is JIRA. JIRA is a proprietary issue tracking product, which includes uses for bug tracking, issue tracking and project management. JIRA is offered for free to open-source projects and organizations that are non-profit, non-government, non-academic, non-commercial, non-political, and secular. JIRA is most usable in software development projects.

The core mechanic of JIRA is managing project-related tasks. To put it simply, managers can create tasks, describe them, and assign particular people to that task. The people then update the status of the task, for example “in progress” or “complete”. JIRA also encourages to estimate the time needed to complete the tasks and compare them to the real times, which may help to estimate time usage better in the future.

The feature particularly related to software development in JIRA is bug tracking. Bug tracking works pretty much in the same way as task management, but bugs are tracked in their own sections. Any user can add bugs and write information about them, for example where the bug occurs and how it should or should not be fixed. Others can then solve these bugs and update their status to JIRA along with a description of how the bug was fixed.


References


http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/wiki.jsp


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIRA

23 February 2011

Privacy concerns with location-based services

Location-based service Foursquare was closing in on 7 million users by the end of February 2011 and about 8% of US online adults ages 18-29 use location based services. The number of users keep on growing as the smartphones become more and more common. The privacy concerns are almost brought up when it comes to location-based services such as Foursquare or Facebook Places, it has also always been an issue preventing the mass appeal of such services in past.

In January 2010, Microsoft released a research on consumer awareness of location-based services. The research revealed that 84% of 1500 location-based service users were concerned about sharing their location data without their consent and 49% of them would be more comfortable if they could easily manage who is able to see their location information. Brendon Lynch, the Chief Privacy Officer of Microsoft says that it's essential that the dialogue about this subject should be open. Consumers should really be educated on the online privacy implications of sharing information online and there is a need for better privacy controls for products and services.

Here's few of Microsoft's basic guidelines how people can enchance privacy while using location-based services:

  • Pay close attention to the location privacy settings on phones, social networking sites and online applications.
  • Don't "check in" on location-based social networking sites from home, and don't include GPS coordinates in tweets, blogs or social networking accounts.
  • Limit who you add to your social network location services, and do not make your location data publicly available or searchable.
  • Don't geo-tag photos of your house or your children. In fact, it's best to disable geo-tagging until you specifically need it.
  • Only trusted friends should know about your location. If you have contacts you don't fully know or trust, it's time to do a purge.

22 February 2011

WordPress blogging platform

WordPress is one of the best know and most used blogging platform nowadays. In this article I would like to describe my personal experiences of using WordPress for creating and managing blogs and websites.

Using WordPress for blogging has a lot of advantages. One of the most important for me is that you have full control about your blog. You can edit code personally to fulfill all your needs but if you are not a programmer, you can just use some of thousands of plugins and themes available for free on internet.

The next advantage of using WordPress is than you can use your own domain name. For comparison, if you are using blogspot.com or blogger.com, you don’t have your own domain, just subdomain (something.blogspot.com), by using WordPress, you can chose your domain name, for example www.mydomain.com . It’s very useful, when you want to use WordPress for commerce websites.

Of course, installing WordPress requires some experiences. You have to be able to buy domain and hosting, copy files to the server by using FTP protocol and set database connection. But if you know how to do this few steps, the whole installation process doesn’t take more than 15 minutes. You can also let somebody with skills do it for you.

I use WordPress platform not only for blogging, but more frequently for creating commerce websites for clients. As I mentioned, you can buy your own domain and set WordPress as a publishing platform. WordPress has very easy and sophisticated interface, so you can set it as a backoffice for commerce sites and let users to edit texts and other content of these websites. For easy commerce websites which usually contains some basic information about company, the only thing you have usually done is to design user interface of website.

WordPress is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) prepared and there is a lot of plugins providing advanced SEO. You don’t need to spend a lot of time with onpage optimization. WordPress has also built in RSS functionality.

WordPress platform is using PHP as programming language and MySQL as database. WordPress is absolutely free of charge. Size of WordPress in compressed form is only 3 MB.

http://wordpress.org/
WordPress Blog

21 February 2011

ScrumWorks - an exceedingly dry blog finale.

A more serious collaborative software application I've previously dealt with both at work and on my studies is ScrumWorks by Danube Technologies, Inc.

As the name implies ScrumWorks supports the use of agile practices, specifically SCRUM, on requirement handling and project management. It is also relatively popular, with the commercial version of the program being used by many high-profile companies, such as Google, Microsoft and Nokia.

ScrumWorks is currently split into pro and basic versions, their main difference being that the basic version is free to use but lacks several features present in the pro version.

The program also contains two alternative clients; one usable as a web client and other that needs to be run on desktop. The desktop version is intended to support extensive manipulation of data such as sprints, user stories, tasks and releases among others. The desktop version also provides the user with statistical data while the web client is a lightweight application used mainly to quickly browse tasks and other properties of their projects.

Of course, to count as a collaborative software support tool ScrumWorks must enable collaborative work by various users, often located on different areas altogether. To accomplish this both clients connect to a remote server, which contains the related information and handles the updates by the clients. ScrumWorks also naturally allows multiple users at once, though in somewhat limited fashion: The individual items of various kinds can be edited separately by different users concurrently, but the users are invisible to one another and no advanced support for multiple users editing same object is provided. In fact multiple simultaneous edits to the same object will only keep the last user's modifications, thus warranting caution as the program offers no warning as the unfortunate user's changes are overwritten by another user, nor does it keep records of the data thus lost.


Source:
[Danube Technologies, Inc.] Danube Technologies, Inc.,
http://www.danube.com/scrumworks/pro/customers, 2011.

18 February 2011

Player Types in Virtual Worlds

It has been studied in a number of studies what kind of people play video games and how they usually like to play. One of the researcher’s is Richard Bartle, who presents the four player types in MUD-games (Multi-User Dungeons) (1996). Later on, Bartle has extended the types to include modern MMO-games as well (2003). The player types are Achiever, Explorer, Killer and Socializer.

Achievers are usually satisfied by game mechanics such as gaining levels, learning new skills, and getting new equipment, i.e. when they achieve something. Achievers are also somewhat competitive.

Adventurers enjoy finding new or hidden places and discovering new things. They enjoy the game’s plot and like to examine it via detail.

Killers are all about competition and action, as they like to fight or compete with other players. They usually feel comfortable knowing that they are better players than others and that their characters are stronger.

Socializers like to interact with other players, non-player characters and the game world. Socializers could be seen as people who just like to hang around, they don’t necessarily want to compete or make progress in the game.

Bartle’s player types are also interesting, because he presents that no player type discloses the others, i.e. every player is more or less of every type, but the magnitude varies. Usually one type is clearly dominant. Bartle’s player test can be done through http://www.gamerdna.com/quizzes/bartle-test-of-gamer-psychology/.

Other player type studies include Bateman & Boon (2005) and Schuurman et al. (2008), but looking at their results, they seem to be really close to Bartle’s player types.

This conveniently brings us to my first blog post, where I wondered whether or not games themselves were groupware or whether the individual elements in a game could be groupware, and I think the answer would be yes. Take a situation where a group of players set out in a dungeon to kill a dragon or whatever, which is so hard to kill that the group really needs to work together and come up with a tactic. There is most likely a party chat, a map and many elements in the game, and they certainly help the players to communicate and achieve the goal of killing the dragon.

References

Player Test: http://www.gamerdna.com/quizzes/bartle-test-of-gamer-psychology/


[Bartle, 1996] Richard Bartle. Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs. The Journal of Virtual Environments. 1, 1996.


[Bartle, 2003] Richard Bartle. Designing Virtual Worlds.
New Riders Publishing, 2003.

[Bateman and Boon, 2005] Chris Bateman and Richard Boon. 21st Century Game Design. Charles River Media, 2005.


[Schuurman et al., 2008] Dimitri Schuurman, Katrien De Moor, Lieven De Marez, Jan Van Looy. Fanboys, competers, escapists and time-killers: a typology based on gamers' motivations for playing video games. Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts, ACM Press, 2008, 46-50.

17 February 2011

IRC channels as virtual communities

The previous blog post made me think about my own experiences in virtual communities. I tried to decide which one of the communities has been the most important one for me. My choice isn't any particular site on the web, but one specific IRC channel.

I had never actually thought that IRC channels can be thought as virtual communities also, but after all IRC channel is a bunch of people with common interests communicating through common medium online. IRC channels often have their own communicational protocols and rules and people have different roles in the community, e.g. web forums may have admins, IRC channel has its operators. Web forums have pests called lurkers, in IRC we just call them idlers. Some of the channels die just because its members can't keep up active conversation, so traditional online communities and IRC channels also face the same problems.

I have used IRC for about 10 years now although I have not been that active all the time. I've had many long breaks in my IRC use. The users on channels have changed over the years and some of them have quit IRCing for good, but it always good to come back and 'see' the familiar people and catch up with them. When I moved away from home in 2003, I already had dozens of friends in the city I moved into and I think my life could be different in so many ways without them (whether in good or in bad). IRC has proved that people can really develop strong bonds with each other online and IRC can really alter the way people act in real life - the company makes one alike in IRC also.

16 February 2011

Virtual communities

I want to share my experience in virtual community. Once there was this MMORPG massive multiplayer online role playing game. It had only few but quite popular servers in my country. Biggest one had around 1500 people playing at the same time. It also had web forum which many of payers visited.

This server ran for couple of years but now it's almost 5 years after that game server closed but the forum is still active to this day. Around 200 people log in this forum and write few hundred posts every day. Most of them could be called spam, some users use forum just as chatting board, some post the news or game screenshots or discuss sports or political events or share funny pictures or jokes. Almost every day there are few new topics asking for suggestions for something. Last one was about electronic shavers.

Personally forum helped me to choose best laptop to buy, explained few package mailing laws, helped to fix my car, several times helped me to fix my computer problems and lot more. I also repay by suggesting to other users problems and posting funniest pictures or jokes I found on the internet. Many people make choices depending of these comments rather than for example consultants in shops.

Most of the users had never met each other in real life, only see their avatars and nicknames and can only briefly know what their professions are only by reading many posts. And still some members got a well deserved reputation over the other members. I personally could maybe tell their professions only for couple people but i respect them for their posts but I don't have any need to met them in real life. Very rarely a new member appears, and most of the times if he wants just jump in into the conversations is being just bulldozed down.

There is only one great risk in it. I don't know if it could be called addiction or just really hard habit but how do you call it when people check several times a day for few weeks when the forum server is down and they cannot reach the forum. You tell me because I was also refreshing forum tab many times each day. Every time I turn on computer first thing is to check whether there are new messages or replies to my comments.

Users of this forum have very different jobs, vide range of age, very different hobbies and the only thing that linked them together in the first place was just a computer game. And still I think it could be called rock solid (virtual) community.