Groupware Ian Gotton*, igor *CSIRO Division of Ir Technology Sydney, NSW 21 13, email iango a sofrware engineering support environment environment, known as the in Sofrware Engineering) Introduction projects creates the y for performing 24 hour software developm me differences between ted to give the effect of continuous and conc ork on the project [2, 31, potentially reducing antly the time-to-market been defined to descri suitable control, globally distributed team support tools for use consultation[6 J : Support Tools for Collaborative Software Engineering Hawryszkiewycz**, Kenny Ragoonaden***, Charles Chung", Shijian Lu*, Guneet Randham** ifonnation **School Of Computing ***Regional Information Australia, TechnologyI Broadway, Ltd, 1 Market St, Sydney NS W Sciences, University of Systems, BT Australasia Pty @syd.dil.csiro.au Sydney NS W 2000 Australia ?OOO Australia developing code modules. Completed code modules are then passed to the remote testing group which performs tests from the test specification, and reports the test failures observed to the development group. The development group fixes problems and instructs the test group to re-test. Responsibility for overall task completion and monitoring remains with the supervisory development group, with responsibility for specifying and carrying out tests residing with the test group. To exploit the overniglht gain effect, the development group can allocatle testing tasks to the test group at the end of their working day. The test group runs as many tests as possible during their day, and hands back at the end of their working day the results to the development group. In this manner, from the development groups perspective, testing has occuned overnight [6]. In order to adequately support this manner of work, we have built a software engineering support environment based on Lotus Notes groupware technology. Initially a simple pirototype was built and trialed, and the results of this case study [7] fed into the development of a more comprehensive toolset known as the GWSE system. This paper presents the brief requirements and the logical and physical architectural solutions devised for the GWSE system. It then describes the use of the system in a trial development project, and plans for further enhancements. GWSE System Requirements The basic requirements for the GWSE system were to provide project management, workflow and transparent document archiving and management to both co-located and globally distributed software development teams. Hence the s,ystem must be able to provide distributed coordination, communication and document management between groups of developers 157