Computer Supported Collaborative Software Engineering

Computer Supported Collaborative Software Engineering

Abstract

Most software projects involve groups of programmers working on multiple versions of programs. Whilst this is clearly a collaborative activity, software is usually developed by an individual exclusively locking a file, editing it, incorporating it back in to the "nightly build", and fixing any problems the following day.
Whilst it seems logical to develop multi-user tools to support software engineering, this turns out to be a surprisingly difficult task. The inter-related nature of software artifacts is vastly more difficult to support than the collaborative development of unstructured artifacts (such as text documents).
In this seminar, we present a conceptual framework that supports the collaborative development of software projects in real time. This is achieved by introducing a semantic analyser that supports incremental source code updates. The analyser reports the impact of source code changes to all interested developers as the changes happen, providing a more synchronous approach than the "nightly build" model, and richer artifact support than existing groupware-based software engineering tools.