Kaiserslautern - Fachbereich Informatik
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Geographically distributed software development holds much promise for increasing market penetration and speeding up development cycles. However, it also comes with a set of new challenges for those developing the software, bought about by the distance among colleagues.This paper outlines a new research project underway to explore those issues and their implications for organizing geographically distributed software development efforts. We also describe the approaches we are taking towards providing solutions - in the form of processes and technology - to address the challenges of working remotely.
Emerging technologies such as the Internet, the World Wide Web, JavaTM technology, and software components, are changing the software business. Activities that have in the past been constrained by the need for intense information management increasingly involve cooperating organizations. Information management tools and techniques do not scale well in the face of this organizational complexity. An informal approach to information sharing, based largely on manual copying of information, cannot meet the demands of the task as size and complexity increase. Formal approaches to sharing information are based on groupware tools, but cooperating organizations do not always enjoy the trust or commonality of sophisticated infrastructure, methods, and skills that this approach requires. Bridging the gap requires a simple, loosely coupled, highly flexible strategy for information sharing. Extensive information relevant to different parts of the software life cycle should be interconnected in a simple, easily described way; such connections should permit selective information sharing by a variety of tools and in a variety of collaboration modes that vary in the amount of organizational coupling they require.
This paper describes the design and implementation of a process support system (PROSYT), which is intended to provide guidance in performing business processes and cooperation among people over a local or geographically distributed architecture. In particular, it can be used as a Process-centered Software Engineering Environment (PSEE) to support distributed software development. Our main purpose is to describe how complex applications of this kind can be developed systematically. In particular, how the requirements of high flexibility, reconfigurability, scalability, and efficiency demanded by these applications can be met through appropriate design choices.