Technology audit and insertion services for TeraGrid
The success of the TeraGrid monitoring and auditing effort will be a joint product of the technical quality of tools and services and their fit to user needs. To assess user needs we are engaging in a rigorous multi-method approach to gather user requirements data and then analyze these data to inform subsequent software development and deployment. The guiding philosophy of this effort is based on user-centered design, with each software release representing an occasion to assess performance and usability in order to inform the next iteration of development.
Our strategy focuses on multi-methods, including: annual user surveys of randomly sampled respondents; log analysis (e.g., correlates of resource utilization); social network analysis (e.g., connections between information seekers and providers in question-and-answer forums); interviews (e.g., of focal resource users and providers); and direct observation (e.g., on site observation of users under operational conditions).
The results of this activity will have practical benefits in terms of informing the management of the larger TeraGrid project, such as in prioritization of effort with respect to documented user needs and updating the status of the project requirements traceability matrix. There is also a strong potential for broader intellectual contributions, particularly in the domain of increased understanding of coordination and delegation of work within virtual organizations, such as those that constitute the TeraGrid user community, but also the virtual organization created to build and deploy TeraGrid.
