# Design and Applications of GLANCE: GLanceable Alarm Notification for a User Centered Experience
## 2 Method
### First Macro-Phase: The GLANCE Project  
Given the twofold objective of (1) providing a solution to a specific company problem and (2) generalizing technical results to achieve research results, the structure of the general organization of the first macro-phase was inspired by the \"tandem model\" proposed by [43] within the realm of Action Research (an iterative methodological approach based on the juxtaposition of action/practice and research/theory [44; 45]). The general idea is that to enforce the mission of production of scholarly knowledge while seeking solutions for a real-life practical problem proposed by an organizational \"client\", two cycles run in parallel (see Figure 1), one addressing the client's problem-solving interest and the other one addressing the researchers' scholarly interest, leading to the desired results after a number of iterations [45; 46] (in Action Research the most utilized structure for a single iteration is the one proposed by [47], including the five stages of diagnosis, action planning, action taking, evaluation, and learning, conducted under theoretical premises singled out during the diagnosis stage of the first iteration). As underlined by [48], Action Research can be successfully and creatively employed in empirical Human Computer Interaction (HCI) research, and has received attention by HCI researchers (see, e.g., [48; 49; 50; 51; 52; 53]). Within the framework of the GLANCE project, we borrowed from the tandem model the ideas of (a) separating yet running in two parallel cycles, the research objective and problem-solving objective and (b) treating the outcome of the research cycle (iteratively evaluated and revised) as the solution method of the problem-solving cycle. The research started within the framework of ongoing cooperation between the University of L'Aquila (in the following denoted as Univaq) and Technolabs S.p.A, with the specific goal (the problem-solving interest) of _enhancing the notification of alarms aimed at  
Figure 1: The tandem model. soliciting technical intervention in a specific optical fiber TLC network._ The investigated organizational context involves alarm information that may be classified along two dimensions:  
* _Alarm class_: Communication, environment, equipment, processing, quality, and security), and
* _Severity level_: Cleared, warning, minor, major, and critical are the five standard levels in this application domain. Additionally, each individual alarm is associated to a tuple of values (referring to temporal, network, object, cause, and location information) and has the life cycle illustrated in Figure 2. The \"alarm raised\" and \"alarm cleared\" transitions are notified by the system to all network operators, while the \"acknowledge\" transition is communicated to the system by the operator taking charge of the technical intervention. Alarms remain \"active\" until acknowledged by an operator. Multiple alarms may be simultaneously active because of faults generated in the same Network Element (NE) or in distinct NEs: With respect to notification purposes, we consider simultaneous alarms \"active at the same time\" (i.e., for which no operator acknowledgement has been received yet), even if it has not necessarily \"arrived at the same time\". It is hence desirable that an alarm notifier be able to provide information not only about a single incoming alarm but also about all active alarms through a global overview. As pointed out in the Introduction, commercially available network monitoring tools may not prove to be effective as notifiers for operators attending to other tasks.