Supporting flexible collaborative software development with SPE–Serendipity

Collaborative software development environments are large cooperative work systems. To effectively support collaborative development, such environments should support software process modelling and enactment, work coordination, and fully integrated software development tools. We describe the facilitation of collaborative software development using the Serendipity process modelling environment and SPE integrated software development environment. Serendipity provides flexible, graphical process modelling tools which are used to describe, enact and improve work processes. A graphical event processing language is used to specify event handling and rules for process models. SPE provides integrated tools for objectoriented software development. Enacted Serendipity process stages define a work context for SPE, and process model views are animated to keep multiple developers aware of others’ work. Enacted process stages record each software artefact modification in SPE, forming a history of work. Shared notes added to process stages and software artefacts facilitate asynchronous communication, and messages and talk-style dialogues facilitate synchronous communication. Process models can be modified and improved during or after use, and be abstracted to form reusable templates. We describe how our approach to integrating Serendipity and SPE addresses many of the foundational issues of process-centred software engineering environments.