INCOME/STAR: Facing the Challenges for Cooperative Information System Development Environments

Abstract

This paper surveys some innovative features of INCOME/STAR, an experimental environment for cooperative development of information systems. First an extension of high-level Petri nets is described: NR/T-nets allow modeling of concurrent processes and related complex structured objects in distributed business applications. Further new concepts have been developed for entity and relationship clustering to support a stepwise top-down approach for entity/relationship based object modeling. Distributed multi-user simulation and prototyping are proposed for the evaluation and analysis of NR/T-nets and the involved object schemata. Then, ProMISE -an evolutionary process model for information system development -is surveyed. A role-based groupware component is part of the INCOME/STAR architecture to support communication, organization and social interaction in development projects.