TY - JOUR T1 - Evaluating MIDST, a system to support stigmergic team coordination JF - Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction Y1 - 2021 A1 - Kevin Crowston A1 - Jeffery Saltz A1 - Niraj Sitaula A1 - Yatish Hegde KW - stigmergic coordination; translucency; awareness; data-science teams AB -

Data science teams working on a shared analysis face coordination problems such as dividing up the work to be done, monitoring performance and integrating the pieces. Research on distributed software development teams has raised the potential of stigmergic coordination, that is, coordination through a shared work product in place of explicit communication. The MIDST system was developed to support stigmergic coordination by making individual contributions to a shared work product visible, legible and combinable. In this paper, we present initial studies of a total of 40 student teams (24 using MIDST) that shows that teams that used MIDST did experience the intended system affordances to support their work, did seem to coordinate at least in part stigmergically and performed better on an assigned project.

VL - 5 IS - CSCW1 ER - TY - JOUR T1 - MIDST: An enhanced development environment that improves the maintainability of a data science analysis JF - International Journal of Information Systems and Project Management Y1 - 2020 A1 - Jeffery Saltz A1 - Kevin Crowston A1 - Heckman, Robert A1 - Yatish Hegde AB -

With the increasing ability to generate actionable insight from data, the field of data science has seen significant growth. As more teams develop data science solutions, the analytical code they develop will need to be enhanced in the future, by an existing or a new team member. Thus, the importance of being able to easily maintain and enhance the code required for an analysis will increase. However, to date, there has been minimal research on the maintainability of an analysis done by a data science team. To help address this gap, data science maintainability was explored by (1) creating a data science maintainability model, (2) creating a new tool, called MIDST (Modular Interactive Data Science Tool), that aims to improve data science maintainability, and then (3) conducting a mixed method experiment to evaluate MIDST. The new tool aims to improve the ability of a team member to update and rerun an existing data science analysis by providing a visual data flow view of the analysis within an integrated code and computational environment. Via an analysis of the quantitative and qualitative survey results, the experiment found that MIDST does help improve the maintainability of an analysis. Thus, this research demonstrates the importance of enhanced tools to help improve the maintainability of data science projects.

VL - 8 UR - http://www.sciencesphere.org/ijispm/archive/ijispm-080301.pdf IS - 3 ER - TY - Generic T1 - Coordination in OSS 2.0: ANT Approach T2 - Proceedings of the 52nd Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-52) Y1 - 2019 A1 - Sangseok You A1 - Kevin Crowston A1 - Jeffery Saltz A1 - Yatish Hegde KW - actor-network theory KW - free/libre open source KW - Stigmergy AB -

Open source software projects are increasingly driven by a combination of independent and professional developers, the former volunteers and the later hired by a company to contribute to the project to support commercial product development. This mix of developers has been referred to as OSS 2.0. However, we do not fully understand the multi-layered coordination spanning individuals, teams, and organizations. Using Actor-Network Theory (ANT), we describe how coordination and power dynamics unfold among developers and how different tools and artifacts both display activities and mediate coordination efforts. Internal communication within an organization was reported to cause broken links in the community, duplication of work, and political tensions. ANT shows how tools and code can exercise agency and alter a software development process as an equivalently active actor of the scene. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the changing nature of open source software development.

JF - Proceedings of the 52nd Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-52) UR - http://hdl.handle.net/10125/59538 ER - TY - Generic T1 - Helping data science students develop task modularity T2 - Proceedings of the 52nd Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-52) Y1 - 2019 A1 - Jeffery Saltz A1 - Heckman, Robert A1 - Kevin Crowston A1 - Sangseok You A1 - Yatish Hegde KW - data science KW - modularity KW - Stigmergy AB -

This paper explores the skills needed to be a data scientist. Specifically, we report on a mixed method study of a project-based data science class, where we evaluated student effectiveness with respect to dividing a project into appropriately sized modular tasks, which we termed task modularity. Our results suggest that while data science students can appreciate the value of task modularity, they struggle to achieve effective task modularity. As a first step, based our study, we identified six task decomposition best practices. However, these best practices do not fully address this gap of how to enable data science students to effectively use task modularity. We note that while computer science/information system programs typically teach modularity (e.g., the decomposition process and abstraction), and there remains a need identify a corresponding model to that used for computer science / information system students, to teach modularity to data science students.

JF - Proceedings of the 52nd Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-52) UR - http://hdl.handle.net/10125/59549 ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Socio-technical affordances for stigmergic coordination implemented in MIDST, a tool for data-science teams JF - Proceedings of the ACM Y1 - 2019 A1 - Kevin Crowston A1 - Jeffery Saltz A1 - Amira Rezgui A1 - Yatish Hegde A1 - Sangseok You KW - stigmergic coordination; translucency; awareness; data-science teams AB -

We present a conceptual framework for socio-technical affordances for stigmergic coordination, that is, coordination supported by a shared work product. Based on research on free/libre open source software development, we theorize that stigmergic coordination depends on three sets of socio-technical affordances: the visibility and combinability of the work, along with defined genres of work contributions. As a demonstration of the utility of the developed framework, we use it as the basis for the design and implementation of a system, MIDST, that supports these affordances and that we thus expect to support stigmergic coordination. We describe an initial assessment of the impact of the tool on the work of project teams of three to six data-science students that suggests that the tool was useful but also in need of further development. We conclude with plans for future research and an assessment of theory-driven system design.

VL - 3 IS - CSCW ER -