No abstract

Collaboration in software engineering projects is usually intensive and requires adequate support by wellintegrated tools. However, process-centered software engineering environments (PSEE) have traditionally been designed to exploit integration facilities in other tools, while offering themselves little to no such facilities. This is in line with the vision of the PSEE as the central orchestrator of project support tools. We argue that this view has hindered the widespread adoption of process-based collaboration support tools by incurring too much adoption and switching costs. We propose a new process-based collaboration support architecture, backed by a process metamodel, that can easily be integrated with existing tools. The proposed architecture revolves around the central concepts of 'deep links' and 'hooks'. Our approach is validated by analyzing a collection of opensource projects, and integration utilities based on the implemented process model server have been developed.

In software engineering, as in any collective endeavor, understanding and supporting collaboration is a major concern. Unfortunately, the main concepts of popular process formalisms are not always adequate to describe collaboration. We extend the Software & System Process Engineering Meta-Model (SPEM) by introducing concepts needed to represent precise and dynamic collaboration setups that practitioners create to address ever-changing challenges. Our goal is to give practitioners the ability to express evolving understanding about collaboration in a formalism suited for easy representation and tool-provided assistance. Our work is based on a collaborative process metamodel we have developed. In this paper, we first present a meta-process for process modeling and enactment, which we apply to our collaborative process metamodel. Then we describe the implementation of a suitable process model editor, and a project plan generator from process models.

No abstract