Group support for distributed collaborative concurrent software modeling

The distributed development of software is increasingly widespread, driven by the globalization of companies and business and enabled by the improvements in communication and computing (Grinter et al., 1999). The distributed development of software introduces new aspects of cooperative work in which a greater emphasis is placed upon technological support of the software development process. Software development activities deal with the complexity by constructing and validating models of the application domain. Models are important artifacts used for communication within the organizations, developers and stakeholders as well. Constructing correct, complete, consistent, and unambiguous models is a tough task that needs concurrent participation of multiple users possibly geographically dispersed. Distribution of software development through meetings is harder to control. Distributed meetings play typically a critical role in teamwork. During which large amount of implicit knowledge is exchanged through negotiation and conflicts resolution. Hence, efforts in supporting distributed development should focus on better supporting distributed meetings (Boulila, 2003)). This research focuses on the specific problem of distributed brainstorming and the construction of UML models of software through successive distributed teamwork meetings. In Particular we investigate the issues we considered in designing a unified framework based on CSCW concepts and software engineering to support concurrent object-oriented software analysis and design phases. We present an activity-based model and a prototype called GroupUML based on the framework.