Abstract not found

Software processes are long-lived entities. Careful design and thorough validation of software process models are necessary to ensure the quality of the process. They do not prevent, however, process models from undergoing change. Change requests may occur in the context of reuse, i.e., statically, in order to support software process model customization. They can also occur dynamically, while software process models are being executed, in order to support timely reaction as data are gathered from the field during process enactment. In this paper, we discuss the mechanisms a process language should possess in order to support changes. We illustrate the solution adopted in the context of the SPADE environment and discuss how the proposed mechanisms can be used to model different policies for changing a software process model.

Over the last 10 years, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) has identified a base set of findings. These findings are taken almost as assumptions within the field. In summary, they argue that human activity is highly flexible, nuanced, and contextualized and that computational entities such as information transfer, roles, and policies need to be similarly flexible, nuanced, and contextualized. However, current systems cannot fully support the social world uncovered by these findings. This paper argues that there is an inherent gap between the social requirements of CSCW and its technical mechanisms. The social-technical gap is the divide between what we know we must support socially and what we can support technically. Exploring, understanding, and hopefully ameliorating this social-technical gap is the central challenge for CSCW as a field and one of the central problems for HCI. Indeed, merely attesting the continued centrality of this gap could be one of the important intellectual contributions of CSCW. This paper also argues that the challenge of the social-technical gap creates an opportunity to refocus CSCW as a Simonian science of the artificial. To be published in Human-Computer Interaction Preprint- Ackerman- Challenge of CSCW 1 1.

We present an architecture for multi-user software development environments, covering general, processcentered and rule-based MUSDEs. Our architecture is founded on componentization, with particular concern for the capability to replace the synchronization component- to allow experimentation with novel concurrency control mechanisms- with minimal effects on other components while still supporting integration. The architecture has been implemented for the Marvel SDE.

Process languages remain a vital area of software process research. Among the important issue for process languages are semantic richness, ease of use, appropriate abstractions, process composability, visualization, and support for multiple paradigms. The need to balance semantic richness with ease of use is particularly critical. JIL addresses these issues in a number of innovative ways. It models processes in terms of steps with a rich variety ofsemantic attributes. The JIL control model combines proactive and reactive control, conditional control, and more simple means of controlow modeling via step composition and execution constraints. JIL facilitates ease of use through semantic factoring, the accommodation of incomplete step specifications, the fostering of simple sub-languages, and the ability to support visualizations. This approach allows processes to be programmed in a variety of terms, and to a variety of levels of detail, according to the needs of particular processes, projects, and programmers.

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 describe the design and representation schemes used in constructing a prototype computational environment for modeling and simulating multi-agent software engineering processes. We refer to this environment as the Articulator. We provide an overview of the Articulator's architecture which identifies five principal components. Three of these components, the knowledge meta-model, the software process behavior simulator, and a knowledge base querying mechanism are detailed and examples are included. The conclusion reiterates what is novel to this approach in applying knowledge engineering techniques to the problems of understanding the statics and dynamics of complex software engineering processes. Index Terms -- agents, artificial intelligence, deductive query, distributed problem solving, meta-model of software processes, modeling of software processes, process programming, process simulation. 1 The authors are with the Computer Science Department, University of Southern California...

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...

This paper discusses the problems that a software development organization must address in order to assess and improve its software processes. In particular, the authors are involved in a project aiming at assessing and improving the current practice and the quality manual of the "Business Unit Telecommunications for Defence (BUTD)" of a large telecommunications company. The paper reports on the usage of formal process modeling languages to detect inconsistencies, ambiguities, incompleteness, and opportunities for improvement of both the software process and its documentation.

Software engineering focuses on producing quality software products through quality processes. The attention to processes dates back to the early 70's, when software engineers realized that the desired qualities (such as reliability, efficiency, evolvability, ease of use, etc.) could only be injected in the products by following a disciplined flow of activities. Such a discipline would also make the production process more predictable and economical.