Test Methodology for Reliability Assessment of Collaborative Tools

摘要

In the past ten years, military operations, as now evident in Iraq, involve both joint- allied and coalition forces. The evolving joint- and coalition-warfare environment presents coordination challenges. Collaborative tools can ease the difficulties in meeting these challenges by enabling highly interactive work to be performed by individuals not necessarily geographically co-located. Collaborative tools will revolutionize the manner in which distributed warfighters interact and inform each other of the mission- planning progress and situation assessment. These systems allow warfighters to integrate tactical information with key combat-support logistics data in both joint- and coalition-warfare environments. Countless collaboration tools and knowledge management systems exist today. Unfortunately, industry has developed these tools and systems for use primarily in exclusive communities of interests, services or agencies. The end result is a proliferation of tools that have not been designed to operate under all network conditions. Since network conditions are not standardized in the joint- and coalition-warfare environment, it is necessary to determine if a collaborative tool can perform under limited- bandwidth and latency conditions. Currently, there are neither evaluation criteria nor methodologies for evaluating collaborative tools with respect to performance reliability. This thesis proposes a test methodology for evaluation of performance reliability of collaborative tools, and demonstrates the effectiveness of the methodology with a case study of the performance evaluation of the InfoWorkSpace collaborative tool.