State-of-the Art Concepts and Future Directions in Modelling Coordination

Coordination is becoming an increasingly important paradigm for systems design and implementation. With multiple languages and models for coordination emerging, it is interesting to compare different models and understand their strengths and weaknesses find common semantic models and develop mappings between formalisms. This will help us to gain a deeper insight into coordination concepts and applications, and also to establish a set of features/criteria for defining and comparing coordination models. In this chapter, the authors present the current work on modelling coordination based on the coordination features. The findings show that software elements have three distinct types of coordination needs—technical, temporal, and process—and that these needs vary with the member’s role; geographic distance has a negative effect on coordination, but is mitigated by shared knowledge of the team and presence awareness; and shared task knowledge is more important for coordination among collocated members. The authors articulate propositions for future research in this area based on the analysis.