Collaborative Software Engineering with a Digital Ecosystem

Adaptation to changing requirements is one of the predominant challenges in distributed development. Software projects exceeding certain scales cannot be addressed by small-sized companies because of the incapability of meeting the financial guarantees and also because of staffing problems. In spite of their advantage of being more flexible, small companies when teaming up are usually overextended due to the overhead of communication and synchronization costs. A need emerges here for an infrastructure endorsing decomposability of software specifications and semi-automatic re-composition of the implemented components to satisfy the original requirements. This infrastructure facilitates a more efficient risk management due to the more finely grained specification. Such an infrastructure is presented here as a result of an ongoing research and implementation activity including real-world testing spanning several European countries and regions