Using Behaviour Characteristics to Improve Groupware Performance

Real-time distributed groupware often performs poorly when network conditions are not optimal. One approach to improving performance is to first look at the characteristics of the information being exchanged by the system, such as payload size and frequency. However, the diversity of tasks, implementations, and groups makes it is difficult to generalize about groupware characteristics. This paper suggests that constrained groupware problems can be characterized efficiently using a low cost approach to identify performance problems and suggest ways that performance can be improved. A case study to characterize GroupDraw. a shared whiteboard application, demonstrates how a constrained groupware problem can be characterized. The analysis of the extracted characteristics identifies a wide range of performance problems and suggests many possible opportunities to improve performance. The success of the case study not only validates this approach, but also provides knowledge about the characteristics of one constrained groupware situation.