Supporting cooperation in the SPADE-1 environment

Software development is a cooperative activity that relies heavily on the quality and effectiveness of the communication channels established within the development team and with the end-user. Process-centered software engineering environments (PSEEs) support the definition and the execution of various phases of the software process. This is achieved by explicitly defining cooperation procedures, and by supporting synchronization and data sharing among its users. PSEE and CSCW technologies have been developed rather independently from each other, leading to a large amount of research results, tools and environments, and practical experiences. We have reached a stage in technology development where it is necessary to assess and evaluate the effectiveness of the research efforts carried out so far. Moreover, it is important to understand how to integrate and exploit the results of these different efforts. The goal of the paper is to understand which kind of basic functionalities PSEEs can and should offer, and how these environments can be integrated with other tools to effectively support cooperation in software development. In particular, the paper introduces a process model we have built to support a cooperative activity related to anomaly management in an industrial software factory. The core of the paper presents and discusses the experiences and results that we have derived from this modeling activity, and how they related to the general problem of supporting cooperation in software development. The project was carried out using the SPADE (Software Process Analysis, Design and Enactment) PSEE and the ImagineDesk CSCW toolkit.