Understanding Integration in a Software Development Environment

In the past ten years there has been a great deal of interest in the concept of a Software Development Environment (SDE) as a complete, unifying framework of services supporting most (or all) phases of software development and maintenance. We identify three levels at which the issue of integration in a SDE arises as a key concept — at the mechanism level (interoperability of the hardware and basic software), at the end-user services level (combining the methods and paradigms of the various tools), and at the process level (adapting end-user services to the working practices of different users, projects and organizations). In this paper we examine SDEs from an integration perspective, describing the previous work in this area and analyzing the integration issues that must be addressed in an SDE. For illustrative purposes, a particular focus of the paper is the configuration management aspects of an SDE.