Grudin, Jonathan. “Groupware and social dynamics: Eight challenges for developers.” Readings in Human–Computer Interaction. Morgan Kaufmann, 1995. 762-774.
The authors discuss groupware and social dynamics for organisations and individual point of views that often portrayed individual experiences rarely being problematic while groupware experiences are often problematic. Through these experiences, it can be seen that there are 8 challenges for software developers developing groupware, namely – disparity in work and benefit, critical mass and prisoner’s dilemma problems, disruption of social processes, exception handling, unobtrusive accessibility, difficulty of evaluation, failure of intuition and breakdown of decision making, and the adoption process.
I feel that some of the issues stated still exist in today’s time. “You can’t please everyone.” Furthermore, I feel open source and free for all Groupware would should have more dissatisfied users than the custom software designed for enterprise users or corporate clients. This is because one of the first concepts we learned in Software Engineering was Software Requirement Specification Document. Hence if custom software is being developed for an enterprise group or corporate client, then the use case and requirements are clearly discussed/revised upon leaving little room for dissatisfaction as compared to general groupware such as Google Suite, etc.
I think it would be a good approach for the groupware developer community to eliminate the disadvantages one by one? It relates very well to my project as it involves multiple people editing multiple articles on the same topic in different languages. Analyzing the existing systems (and hopefully solving the problem) keeping these 8 problems in mind would be a novel structured lens to view our project with.
As compared to when the article was published, the situation for groupware has greatly improved, but it is still not ready to become a mainstream product is it? Would someone be ready to replace a single user software with groupware completely? I personally wouldn’t mind (I advocate Google Suite all the time) however, there are 20% use cases, where I would unwillingly have to use single user software I guess.