The usefulness of CSCW systems in process-sensitive software engineering environments

Abstract

Software creation, development and maintenance are activities that require a great quantity of cooperative work. In the last years, several languages to model the diverse software processes have been proposed. However, these software Process Modelling Languages (PML) have not ended up being standardized nor being implanted by a majority in industry. The so-called Process-sensitive Software Engineering Environments (PSEE) are software engineering environments with support to manage PML. Each PSEE proposed has a PML associated, so there is a clear dependence between the software engineering environment and its modelling language. In this article, the cooperative support that a PSEE should offer is analyzed, and an environment with support for software PMLs is presented. This environment provides workspaces for distributed synchronous collaboration where work teams can develop a software project. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.