Section: New Results

Effect of Delay on Group Performance

Participants : François Charoy, Claudia-Lavinia Ignat [contact] , Gérald Oster.

We continued our work on studying the effect of delay in real-time collaborative editing. Delays exist between the execution of one user’s modification and the visibility of this modification to the other users. Such delays are in part fundamental to the network, as well as arising from the consistency maintenance algorithms and underlying architecture of collaborative editors. Existing quantitative research on collaborative document editing does not examine either concern for delay or the efficacy of compensatory strategies.

In [12] we studied a collaborative note taking task where we introduced simulated delay. The study was done with 20 groups of 4 users which were asked to listen to a short interview and take notes. We found out a general effect of delay on performance related to the ability to manage redundancy and errors across the document. We interpret this finding as a compromised ability to maintain awareness of team member activity, and a reversion to independent work. Measures of common ground in accompanying chat indicate that groups with less experienced team members attempt to compensate for the effect of delay. In contrast, more experienced groups do not adjust their communication in response to delay, and their performance remains sensitive to the delay manipulation. Results of this study support our team assertion that delay associated with conventional consistency maintenance algorithms will impede group performance. Therefore, these results promote the use of novel algorithms such as CRDTs and motivate the pursuance of research and development on these approaches.