Tool Construction for the British Airways SEE with the O2 ODBMS

Software engineering environments (SEE) support the construction and maintenance of large-scale software systems. They integrate tools for the production and maintenance of documents such as requirements definitions, architecture definitions or user manuals. Very few SEE tools meet all the developers' requirements. Some requirements that are important in practice have not been appropriately addressed. These are inter-document consistency handling, version and configuration management and cooperative work. We claim that the reason for current tools not meeting these requirements is the fact that the required database support for maintaining documents is only now becoming available. The British Airways SEE meets these new requirements. Its tools were constructed using the O2 object database management system, which has been extended to become a database management system for software engineering. We discuss the experiences we made during tool construction for this SEE.