Perspectives on software development environments

Abstract

Using graph-like structures to store and organise ideas, concepts and programs in a Software Development Environment is not new. This approach, however, has two drawbacks: the rigidity and large size of the resulting graph. Users have difficulty managing change in the network and as the information piles up, they have trouble finding their way in the graph. In this paper we describe an organisation based on perspectives that attempts to alleviate these problems. Perspectives provide a uniform model for views, versions and contexts - and can be composed via perspective operations. After a brief introduction where we examine the problem, we give a more rigorous description of the model behind perspectives and the operations that can be perform@ed on them. Finally, we outline a prototype implementation built to demonstrate the power and flexibility of our model.