Distributing the software process

This paper sees software development as made up of two important parts. One is the technical work in producing software. The other is the team management and coordination in large and complex systems. Support tools for software development have in general concentrated on providing technical support to improve task productivity. These have included CASE tools as well as various editors, debugging tools and so on. Trends to geographically distributed software development call for providing team support to coordinate activities across distances. This paper describes methods for providing such support using groupware. It outlines different support strategies for different team structures and describes an experimental system for supporting mission oriented teams and some results of using this experimental system.