Taking care of cooperation when evolving socially embedded systems: The PloneMeeting case

This paper proposes a framework to (i) analyse the contexts of socially embedded systems and (ii) support the understanding of change during their evolutions. Our finding is based on a cooperative project with a government agency developing a partially-automated variability configurator for an open source software product family. By employing our framework, we realised that the way variations and their management are implemented have to accommodate work practices from the use context as well as development practice, and here especially the cooperation within the development team and between users and developers. The empirical evidence has confirmed our understanding of what is relevant when estimating the evolvability of socially embedded systems. We propose to use our framework in architecture-level design and evaluation in order to take these cooperative relationships into account early in the evolution cycle.