4everedit - Team-based Process Documentation Management

The introduction and successful application of engineering processes demands a modern infrastructure which supports efficient and convenient management of the various work products, their life-cycle, and their relations to each other. Mostly, work products are realized in form of electronic documents which can easily be edited, stored, copied and exchanged. However, most infrastructures are fundamentally limited by the fact that the information contained in many documents is not accessible because its semantics is unknown. For example, software engineers often document the design of a software architecture in a rather unstructured way and hence cannot benefit from automatic evaluations such as consistency checks regarding the document itself (is it complete?) or its dependencies to other documents (is there a test specification for each component?). Because most documents are inherently structured as a result of applying certain methods (such as CRC-Cards for software requirements engineering) and because techniques are available to model and handle structured documents (such as XML), combining both successfully seems to be a small gap to bridge. In this paper we present the essential concepts to support team-based editing of structured textbased engineering documents. We report on our experiences from the application of the infrastructure “4everedit” in a large-scale industrial process engineering project.