Supporting Cooperative Software Development through a Multimedia Environment

The evolution and improvement of both network and workstation technology made possible the realisation of several distributed environments to effectively supported group work. This comprehends the accessibiblity to more cheaper and powerful resources on video-conferencing, data-transfer and multimedia capabiblies which are becoming common place and used as bottom platforms to cooperative solutions. The aim of this paper is to propose a global solution to support Cooperative Software Development (CSD) through a multimedia environment. These CSD systms have as main goal to enable several users connected over a network to work together in order to develop software. They have to solve problems such as: coherence maintenance of the software project through the distributed system by managing possible conflicts between local versions of each group member and, above all. promote the necessary mechanisms for the inter-group awareness and integrity. We introduce here the strategies of our own CS D prototype: a computer-supported cooperative work architecture for software development. It enables a group of developers (2 to 4), possibly located at remote places and connected over network, to develop software together. A cooperative multimedia editing environment is available for the whole Development Cycle, enclosing mechanisms of computer-conferencing (text, audio, and video communications).