ABSTRACT

It is a common scenario to see project’s stakeholders, such as managers, team leaders, and developers carrying out their meeting in the online environment without a suitable preparation and facilitation For instance, stakeholders engaging in negotiation sessions trying to communicate system requirements in the virtual environment might face requirements misunderstanding which in turn might cause a whole project to fail.Usually a meeting agenda and design is implicit in the facilitator’s head. Conducting such meetings without obvious structure would potentially lead to various problems such as no one seemed to be in charge? Or there was no clear reason to meet or no agenda etc.
In this paper, we are presenting a general framework to model group-based activities and meetings within software engineering field in a simplified and formal manner. Traditionally, managers submit their web-based group meeting information in a form of text-based instructions [1]. Then a group facilitator or chairperson will lead the group throughout the meeting to achieve the desired objectives.
These types of meeting are relatively easy to manage in face-to-face environment where web based meeting in the other hand, is more challenging to facilitate and manage. Therefore, more and more specialized tools are immerging to manage and facilitate such meetings. For instance, Adobe Connect [2] is tool for facilitating web-based meetings. These tools usually allow facilitators to organize and prepare the meeting floor by inserting specific collaboration components such as chat, whiteboard, voting, etc. Then during the meeting the facilitator guides participants using the video or text component. This usually leads to undesirable outputs due to the lack of a clear structure or agenda in addition to the virtual distance that weakens the communication.
In this paper a two level of modeling views are proposed, the static view and the dynamic view. The static view mainly represents the aggregation association between session stages, phases, and activities. The dynamic view shows how meeting modules or elements within various activities are accessed during runtime. A particular modeling tool called “MEET-Represent” is being developed according to the proposed process in this paper to assist meetings designers to collaborate and model their meetings in advance to ensure the coherence and alignment of the meeting mini-tasks with the overall meeting objectives and goals.