Validating the Formal Specification of the THUNDERS Process

Abstract

Collaborative work encourages participants to build knowledge through exploration, discussion, negotiation, and debate to generate a better understanding or shared understanding of a concept, problem, or situation within a group. The aim of collaborative work is to find that shared understanding, which is understood as the existing agreement or similarity in the perceptions of the participants on a topic. Considering this, it can be determined that the greater the understanding and cohesion among all team members, the better results will be obtained in the development of the tasks and responsibilities that each of the members must fulfill, generating greater group trust and allowing everyone to move in the same direction. However, such understanding is not easy to build, there is no clarity on how it should be built, and it is simply given as something obvious or to be achieved, without giving it real importance. Trying to address these problems, from the multi-cycle action research methodology, THUNDERS is defined as a process that establishes how to build shared understanding in problem-solving activities. This article shows the conceptual and methodological cycles for its construction, and more in detail the validation cycle, in which was performed: an expert validation of the formal specification of THUNDERS to determine the correctness and completeness of its structure, a quality validation of its process model SPEM 2.0, and an experiment to validate its feasibility and usefulness. As results of these validations, it was obtained that THUNDERS needs to improve the syntactic and semantic elements of its specification and the cognitive load generated by its use. In addition, it was found that is a viable and useful process for the construction of a shared understanding with each of the elements that compose it.