Considerations and Requirements for Tools Supporting Mobile Teams Mario Pichler, Thomas Hofer, Gerhard Leonhartsberger Software Competence Center Hagenberg (SCCH) Hauptstrasse 99, A-4232 Hagenberg, Austria {mario.pichler, thomas.hofer, gerhard.leonhartsberger}@scch.at Abstract Product development processes increasingly happen in cooperations, where cooperation partners are dislocated in time and space. This leads to the fact that teamworkers have to be more and more mobile and brings us to the presumption that the support of spontaneous information exchange and mobile ad hoc interaction among team members will gain in importance. Some of the questions that have to be answered when building tools for supporting mobile teamwork as well as the requirements for such tools will be discussed in this paper. 1 Introduction Without doubt, teamwork works best if all team members work together at the same time at the same place. But to meet the requirements of increasingly complex systems, tight time constraints for their development as well as acceptance and usability requirements, it is necessary to establish cooperations for product development. Mostly these cooperations reach beyond organizational boundaries. This makes clear that physical proximity of all team members is not possible at any time. Especially then, when cooperations reach beyond time zones. Also the increasing flexibility of working time (e.g. part-time jobs, flexible time etc.) as well as the trend towards telework and working at home are reasons that team members are working at different times at different places. All these issues will determine that team members are performing their job in form of individual tasks. It is necessary to support these individual tasks to form some sense of group (team) awareness, which in turn will enable teamwork. 2 Mobile Teamwork First of all we have to answer the question what the term mobile teamwork stands for. Does it mean to integrate mobile (field) workers using laptop computers or pocket PCs at anytime from anywhere into the organization’s business processes? Does it mean to enable people moving across organization units to have seamless access to required information and to cooperate with others from every place of the company? Or does it mean to use chance encounters of team members to establish some sort of ad hoc cooperation? However, what all of these questions have in common is the need for time- and location independent support of cooperation of team members. In our current work we are focusing on the latter question, namely on how to provide support for ad hoc cooperation. 3 Current Work: The Hydrogen Project Bringing together people, information and things is the vision of our current research project called Hydrogen [6]. The objective of this project is an investigation of innovative approaches for the support of spontaneous information exchange and mobile ad hoc interaction among people. As mentioned earlier in the paper work is becoming more flexible and mobile. This implies that required information is accessible from everywhere at anytime, even spontaneous. From SCCH’s point of view this vision is called ubiquitous business (UB) – the vision of a ubiquitous information access. For building applications, which will realize this vision, we find it essential to take the very dynamic execution environment of those applictions into account. Such applications constantly need to monitor the environment to allow the application to react accordingly. Information about the environment, also called context, typically includes relevant information about the user's location, the used device (with its screen resolution, memory and other constraints) on which the application is executed, constraints about the network connection and the user of the application itself. Context-awareness is especially interesting in mobile scenarios where the context of the application is highly dynamic and allows the application to deal with the constraints of mobile devices in terms of presentation and interaction abilities and communication Proceedings of the 22 nd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems Workshops (ICDCSW’02) 0-7695-1588-6/02 $17.00 © 2002 IEEE