Social Software

The Social Software Engineering research at the INESC-ID Software Engineering Group focus on the interaction between people and software. The aspects addressed are two fold: On the one hand, it considers the software development process as a social construct; On the other hand, it regards software tools as social enablers. The former addresses issues like the Collaborative Development of Software and agile methods for software development, whereas the later focus on the use of social software features to enable social interactions and the creation of social entities.

We envision software environments which automate work without giving up on people empowerment.

Several projects are taking place where these issues are addressed in either isolation or combination.

  • The Blended Workflow project fuses a workflow activity-based approach with a workflow goal-based approach to smoothly support an automated standard behaviour together with human guided deviations whenever unexpected situations occur.
  • The Social Edition environment is a software tool that leverages on social software features to foster the collaboration among stakeholders in the edition of a literary text.
  • Processpedia is a business process management software environment which fosters the collaboration among all stakeholders without disrupting the way they work and perceive their work.
  • The Collaborative Development focus on the detection and resolution of code conflicts while software is being concurrently developed by distributed teams of programmers.