Large cooperative work systems require work coordination, context awareness and process modelling and enactment mechanisms to be effective. Support for process modelling and work coordination in such systems also needs to support informal aspects of work which are difficult to codify. Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) facilities, such as inter-person communication and collaborative editing, also need to be well-integrated into both process-modelling tools and tools used to perform work. Serendipity is an environment which provides high-level, visual process modelling and event-handling languages, and diverse CSCW capabilities, and which can be integrated with a range of tools to coordinate cooperative work. This paper describes Serendipity's visual languages, support environment, and architecture, together with experience using the environment and integrating it with other environments. 1. Introduction Most computerised or semi-computerised work systems have evolved informal...

Component-based software architectures are increasingly being adopted as solutions for various software engineering problems. We describe a component-based software architecture and its supporting CASE tool we have been developing. Our tool supports both static and dynamic visualisation of component-based systems, together with end-user configuration of such systems by user extension of these visualisations. We describe the application of this tool to the development of component-based design environments, focusing on visualisations developed when specifying a process modelling tool. 1. Introduction Component-based software architectures are becoming more common as software developers realise these have greater potential for improved reusability, robustness and end-user configuration than conventional software systems. Example domains include user interfaces, databases, client-server architectures, design tools and visualisation tools. The central idea of component-based software arch...

When working on complex software systems, it is often difficult for multiple software developers to coordinate their work, and for developers to coordinate their multiple tool and software process usage. Process-centred Software Engineering Environments attempt to help developers manage the complexities of such coordination by codifying steps in a software process, and codifying the "work context" a developer utilises (i.e. the artefacts, tools and collaborators the developer requires during their work). Unfortunately most process-centred environments do not adequately support work coordination, ease-of-use and improvement of process models. We describe our work utilising histories of past events within a process-centred environment to give developers extra leverage when using process models to guide collaborative software development. We describe techniques for work history determination, improved visualisation support for work coordination, and automatic process enactment and process...

Event-based software systems, such as componentware, tool abstraction, message passing systems, software process environments, and many data visualisation systems, are becoming ever more common. Constructing, understanding, and modifying such systems can be very difficult, however, and appropriate software visualisation support is often a great help to developers. We describe some issues in both statically and dynamically visualising a range of event-based software systems. We illustrate these issues with examples from our own experiences in developing a diverse range of event-based software visualisation notations and tools. 1. Introduction Event-based software systems are based on software architectures that utilise the ideas of software component interdependencies, the propagation of objects representing events between components, and the appropriate response to these events by the receiving components [18]. Examples of event-based software systems include the following: . Compone...

In earlier work we have developed three domain specific visual approaches for event-based system specification. The first, ViTABaL-WS, uses the Tool Abstraction (TA) metaphor to support specification of web services composition via higher level data and control flows and generation of BPEL4WS code. The second, Kaitiaki, uses an Event-Query-Filter-Action (EQFA) metaphor to allow visual primitives composition and java code generation for diagramming tool event handlers. The third, MaramaTatau, uses a spreadsheet-like metaphor to construct meta-model formulae visually to specify structural dependencies and constraints to be realised at runtime. We propose an integrated visual approach that is generalised from these three explored exemplar approaches to specify event handling behaviours. We derive a canonical event handling model which enables interoperability between these exemplar event models, with also the support for synthesised runtime visualisation. This paper discusses the requirements and design of the resulting general purpose event handling framework, its evaluation and some key future directions. 1.