A Framework for Collaborative Applications using a Client-Server Network With Supernodes
Date
2016-01-04
Authors
Zhao, YiYun
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Abstract
Today's product managers must quickly determine viable avenues for innovation
while carefully balancing the costs and benefits involved. Agile methodologies are
highly incremental and often seen as lacking in rigour and due diligence. This thesis
explores the relationship between processes and tools that are commonplace for
product managers versus those that tend to be reserved for researchers. A case
study reveals key opportunities for the practices in each domain to inform each other,
and further identifies the need for gaps in the tooling to be addressed. The study
uses Think Together, a collaborative mobile application for interactive presentations
with rich media content. The application supports individual action layers for each
user and session replay, creating several challenging bottlenecks that jeopardize the
scalability of the original implementation. A proposal for an alternative network
configuration for communication to address these bottlenecks is examined from both
a product management viewpoint and from a more traditional research perspective.
A simulator is used as a means to analyze and evaluate the proposed configuration,
revealing essential trade-o s in terms of efficiency and productivity. Unlike testing
on real devices, the simulator is much more in line with agile processes, enabling
more power and
flexibility without the limitations of physical resources. However,
the extent to which simulated results are practical in the real world, in particular to
product managers, is an open question. We demonstrate how a lifecycle involving
both traditional approaches to research and incremental implementation strategies
in agile environments complements each other, and further identify current obstacles
involved.
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Keywords
network, simulation, agile