Towards the improvement of the software quality: An Enterprise 2.0 architecture for distributed software developments

Software development is tightly dependent on the tools available for supporting its processes. Organizational and sociotechnical peculiarities such as indefinition of roles, geographically distributed development teams, new business models and diverse cultural interactions steer these tools. Software development supported by web-based services, built on top of Web 2.0 technologies, is emerging as a new paradigm for distributed software development. New generation software forges (web-based development environments) such as EzForge are becoming the infrastructure that provides the required features for hosting collections of software development projects. They are composed of an integrated set of tools, interacting in a mashup-like environment, each one suited for a specific task, and therefore simple enough to keep total complexity low. An adequate selection of tools helps developers to focus on the implementation of the requirements, while at the same time they cope with complex information coming from many individuals and organizations. The complexity of distributed software development requires a controlled and a strong collaboration amongst developers, which has to be supported by the selected architecture. Moreover, an increased demand on quality assurance is required by the many organizations aiming to achieve a certain quality level. A new architecture based on the Web 2.0 core ideas and methods overcomes these challenges in software development, representing a cornerstone to achieve satisfactory results in this ambitious environment.