Maintaining shared workspaces consistency during software development

Abstract

The development of large software is always done by teams of people working together and struggling to produce quality software within their budget. Each person in these teams generally knows his job and wants to do it, without being bothered by other people. However, when people work towards a common goal they have to exchange data and create dependencies between each other regarding these data. If these people have to follow a process, cooperating and synchronizing with co-workers and trying to reach one's own goal becomes too difficult to manage. This may lead to frustration, lower productivity and reluctancy to follow the predefined process. This is why some support is needed to avoid common mistakes that occur when people exchange data. In this paper, a hybrid approach to support cooperation is presented. The originality of this approach is the ability to enforce general properties on cooperative interactions while using the semantic of applications to fit particular situations or requirements. This paper gives a brief idea about the general enforced properties on activity interactions. It describes in detail the semantic rules that control activity results, the impacts of the cooperation on these rules and how both dimensions interact.