Towards Computer-Supported Concurrent Software Engineering

A software engineering task such as design, programming, debugging, testing, and inspection typically requires the concurrent participation of multiple users, possibly geographically dispersed. However, traditional software engineering environments provide limited support for enabling concurrent software engineering. For instance, they do not allow multiple users to concurrently debug code together using separate workstations. This problem is not unique to software engineering since traditional computing systems have not been designed to enable collaborative work1. It is a particularly serious problem in software engineering since software engineering costs are constantly increasing as a percentage of the cost of large systems and research has shown that the cost of interaction among team members is a significant part of the total cost of these systems2. Environments with support for improved interaction can allow software engineering to be performed more concurrently, potentially substantially decreasing these costs.