The need for a cooperative model: the Adele/Tempo experience

Our position is that the software process is fundamentally cooperative. We have been developing concepts and mechanism to tackle with cooperation in the Adele/Tempo project. Firstly, we integrated into the Tempo software process formalism a new concept: cooperation classes. In addition, we provided temporal, event-condition-action (TECA) rules in order to monitor and control cooperative activities. Based on TECA rules and cooperation classes, we can describe exchange information policies between software developers as well as rules about the organization, evolution and consistency of software projects. Secondly, we have been developing a transaction management system which is able to support the Tempo cooperative model. This system has been built up to deal with un-predicted events provoked by activities carried out in cooperative work environments.