It is generally recognized that the classical transaction model, providing atomicity and serializability, is too strong for certain application areas since it unnecessarily restricts concurrency. We are concerned with supporting cooperative work in multi-user design environments, particularly teams of programmers cooperating to develop and maintain software systems. We present an extended transaction model that meets the special requirements of software engineering projects, describe possible implementation techniques, and discuss a number of issues regarding the incorporation of such a model into multi-user software development environments. To appear in Sixth International Conference on Data Engineering, Los Angeles CA, February 1990. 1 Introduction The focus of this paper is on how to support groups of individuals who are cooperating to achieve common goals in the context of design environments based on object management systems; we are specifically concerned with teams...

We present a general model of software development environments that consists of three components: structures, mechanisms and policies. The advantage of this model is that it distinguishes intuitively those aspects of an environment that are useful in comparing and contrasting software development environments. Our initial application of the model is to characterize four classes of environments by means of a sociological metaphor based on scale: the individual, the family, the city and the state models. The utility of the IFCS taxonomy is that it delineates the important classes of interactions among software developers and exposes the ways in which current software development environments inadequately support the development of large systems. We demonstrate the generality of our model by also applying it to a previously published taxonomy that categorizes environments according to how they relate to four historical trends: language-centered, structure-oriented, toolkit and method-bas...

We present a CASE-tool integration strategy based on enveloping pre-existing tools without source code modifications, recompilation, or assuming an extension language or any other special capabilities on the part of the tool. This Black Box enveloping (or wrapping) idea has been around for a long time, but was previously restricted to relatively simple tools. We describe the design and implementation of a new Black Box enveloping facility intended for sophisticated tools --- with particular concern for the emerging class of groupware applications. keywords: Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Environment Frameworks, Tool Enveloping, Tool Integration c fl1994, Giuseppe Valetto and Gail E. Kaiser 1 1 This work was conducted while Mr. Valetto was a graduate student at Columbia University. Prof. Kaiser is supported in part by Advanced Research Project Agency under Contract F30602-94-C-0197, in part by National Science Foundation Grant CCR-9301092, and in part by grants from AT&T Foundation, Bull HN Information Systems and IBM Canada Ltd. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the US Government, AT&T, Bull, IBM or Xerox. 1 1

One of the main problems within concurrent engineering is the visibility of activities and knowledge across perspectives. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a method to enhance communication between developers of different views. It is based on reconciled planning and communication procedures arranged around a form called House-of-Quality (HoQ). Descriptions like "Listening to the Voice of the Customer" or "A Method for Guaranteeing Communication" emphasize the importance of communication. Most of todays QFD implementations neglect its communication aspects. Improving QFD with approaches used in the area of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) as well as Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) are leading to a new generation of QFD tools. This paper introduces the integration of two techniques Argumentation Systems and Electronic Meeting Systems into a QFD-tool. 1. Introduction One of the main problems within concurrent engineering is the visibility of activities and knowledge ...

Within information systems development business modelling is often used to structure goal decomposition and goal satisfaction. Business modells serve as a framework for a concrete information systems project. However, the concept of goal is not explicit in the leading business reference models. In this paper we show how goals can be used to drive the modelling process. Goals are not only used as a starting point of development but serve as criteria to evaluate actions and decisions throughout the design. We show how business and goal models can be integrated using a common process meta model. An environment to support decision making in the business modelling process has been developed to demonstrate our approach. 1 Introduction The main objectives of business modelling within information systems development are first, to improve and document the knowledge regarding the current and the desirable situation of the business, second to reach a clear and structured set of documents on goal...

"Industrial strength" software development environments (SDEs) must provide facilities to address three essential properties of multi-developer software systems: evolution, complexity and scale. It is my contention that in order to be an industrial strength SDE, an environment must support at least a city model environment. Moreover, SDEs must include such high level policies as supporting cooperation and communication, supporting a unified process and product, providing multiple means of expression, supporting inter- and intraconnections, managing the change process and managing the multiplicity of versions. Underlying the implementation of these policies are three themes: developer-machine symbiosis in which the machine becomes an active partner in system development and evolution; formalization of the development/evolution process so that we can reason about the process and automate its support; and finally, formalization of the software product so that we can reason about it and au...

This report describes the current state of my research in software development environments. I argue in favour of strong support for project management, comprehension and navigation, and collaboration primarily based on experiences from developing large-scale industrial-strength applications. An underlying model of such an environment, named "Ragnarok", is outlined. A design and first prototype of important parts of Ragnarok is described as well as some results from initial experiments. Contents 1 Introduction 4 2 Motivation 4 2.1 A retrospective case study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 3 Contours 6 3.1 Hypothesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 3.2 Aspects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 3.2.1 Project management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 3.2.2 Comprehension & Navigation . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....

Peter Sawyer B.Sc. A User Interface Framework for Object-Oriented Database Systems Submitted for the degree of Ph.D. March 1990 Object-oriented database systems (OODBs) provide support for applications which manipulate semantically rich entities of varying granularity. Many existing commercial database systems provide direct manipulation tools which permit users to access database entities and generate applications. Users of OODBs also require sophisticated tools, but the database entities manipulated are of less uniform structure and semantics. The work reported in this thesis has developed a model of a user interface framework for OODBs. The model exploits objects' encapsulation of data (attributes) and operations (methods). It is based on an abstraction from objects to dynamic forms; attributes are represented as fields and methods are represented as graphical buttons. Forms are dynamic because they reflect the functional properties of their underlying objects. A prototype sy...

Data Type which consists of an object and an execution submodel. Both are influenced by the context and 4 organization in which their instances are used -- large communities of software developers, users, and managers. Change, complexity, and heterogeneity of representation are ubiquitous in specification management. They must be addressed in the object submodel, e.g., by representations for versioning, configuration, and mapping between different object views. The execution model has to cope not only with the problems of multi-version concurrency control but also with explicit communication and coordination in large development teams, possibly distributed in space and time. The meta data model that supports such a setting could in principle be very loose (e.g., hypertext), or it could require full formalization of the available language concepts, methods, and tools, even of the roles of human developers. Probably, neither extreme should be followed. Simple hypertext structures have ...

: Software engineering methodologies rely on various and complex graphical representations and are more useful when associated to CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) tools designed to take care of constraints that have to be respected. Now, CASE tools gave way to CASE environments (a set of tools that have a strong coherence in their us). This concept provides enhanced solutions for software reusability while the environment may be adapted to a specific understanding of a design methodology. This paper describes FrameKit, an Ada based framework dedicated to the quick implementation of CASE environments. We summarize first the concepts implemented in FrameKit and illustrate them using a detailed example of a simple tool implementation and integration. Key word: Generic CASE, Software platform, Tool integration, Software Engineering, quick implementation 1. Introduction Software engineering methodologies rely on various and complex graphical representations such as SA-RT, OMT,...