DOOD: distributed object-oriented software development environment

Abstract

The object-oriented method has become very popular in software development because of its efficiency in automating software development processes and reusing software modules. To date, various object-oriented CASE tools have been used. However, they have concentrated on providing tools for developing software systems within some particular area. Even though we can use a general-purpose CSCW tool for cooperative software development in a distributed environment, current CSCW systems do not support any efficient object-oriented software development method. This paper discusses ways of combining CSCW features with an object-oriented CASE tool by introducing the experimental distributed object-oriented software development environment DOOD (Distributed Object-Oriented Designer). DOOD supports three models (the object model, the dynamic model and the functional model) of OMT (Object Modeling Technique) and provides consistent and transparent user interfaces for minimizing the effects of a geographically dispersed development environment. Our system is implemented based on a client-server architecture. The DOOD/Server manages the communication among clients and guarantees concurrent and consistent accesses to all the objects in the central repository, while DOOD/Client provides modeling and collaboration schemes over a TCP/IP network.