Supporting collaborative development using process models: An integration-focused approach

Software engineering projects are highly collaborative. Existing tools designed to support collaboration usually provide some specific service, and integration with other tools using data and events. However, Process-Centered Software Engineering Environments have traditionally been designed with different assumptions. The process is usually considered as the central aspect of the software project, and used as a center of control. As a result, great emphasis has been placed on the ability of PSEEs to invoke other tools, or use data generated by other tools. However, the integration in the other direction, that is, the ability of other tools to query the data managed by PSEEs (the process model), and hook into their extensions points, has been largely ignored, as it is not compatible with the vision of the PSEE as the central orchestrator of project support tools. We argue that this view has hindered the widespread adoption of process-based collaboration support tools by incurring too much adoption and switching costs, and propose a new process-based collaboration support architecture, backed by a process metamodel, which can easily be integrated with existing tools.