Collaborative Software Engineering

Sponsors: NSF Database and Expert Systems Program (IRI-9408708)

Researchers : Prasun Dewan, John Riedl, Jon Munson

Description : This research covers two closely related areas of collaboration technology: collaborative tools and infrastructures. In the area of collaborative tools it is addressing the potential of these tools for making distributed collaborative software engineering tasks more concurrent, thereby allowing these time-consuming tasks to be completed significantly more quickly. In the area of collaborative infrastructures, it is addressing support for near-automatic generation of efficient, collaborative tools, thereby significantly reducing the tremendous amount of effort required to program these tools manually. These two efforts are related since the infrastructure is being used to build the tools and the tools are being used to evaluate the infrastructure. Some of the specific issues being addressed include security , consistency , undo , computer support for gathering software engineering requirements, and asynchronous software engineering meetings. The research is using an experimental method wherein the infrastructure and tools are being implemented and used in case studies. The research results include taxonomies of collaboration scenarios; principles , interaction models, software abstractions, and architectures that support these scenarios; and evaluation of the infrastructure and tools being developed.