Supporting Collaborative Development Using Process Models: A Tool Integration-Focused Approach

Abstract

Collaboration in software engineering projects is usually intensive and requires adequate support by well-integrated tools. However, process-centered software engineering environ ments (PSEE) have traditionallybeen designed to exploit integration facilities in other tools, while offering themselves little to no such facilities.This is in line with the vision of the PSEE as the central orchestrator of project support tools. We argue that thisview has hindered the widespread adoption of process-based collaboration support tools by incurring too muchadoption and switching costs. We propose a new process-based collaboration support architecture, backed by aprocess metamodel, that can easily be integrated with existing tools. The proposed architecture revolves aroundthe central concepts of ‘deep links’ and ‘hooks’. Our approach is validated by analyzing a collection of open-source projects, and integration utilities based on the implemented process model server have been developed.