Exploiting Process Events for the Integration of Collaborative Software Development Tools

Abstract

"Hooks" are an important part of tool integration in software engineering. They allow any development tool to broadcast a development event to some subscribing tools. Most of the existing software development tools have a rich catalog of well-defined events which can be exploited by third parties. This allows any tool to have a complete view of the development environment, without forcing the team to adopt a monolithic, all-encompassing tool. However, process-support tools have been rather weak as contributors to such integration strategy, giving preference to a style of integration where the process-support tool is the central orchestrator of the development environment. This study argues that not only do process support-tools have a rich catalog of events of interest to third party tool but the availability of such events can also significantly improve the overall level of development support. It thus proposed formalism for modeling process events, identified a set of process events of interest for other development tools and described an implementation of the approach in a process server.