Utilising past event histories in a process-centred software engineering environment

Abstract

When working on complex software systems, it is often difficult for multiple software developers to coordinate their work, and for developers to coordinate their multiple tool and software process usage. Process centred software engineering environments attempt to help developers manage the complexities of such coordination by codifying steps in a software process, and codifying the context a developer utilises (i.e. the artefacts, tools and collaborators the developer requires during their work). Unfortunately most process centred environments do not adequately support work coordination, ease of use and improvement of process models. We describe our work utilising histories of past events within a process centred environment to give developers extra leverage when using process models to guide collaborative software development. We describe techniques for work history determination, improved visualisation support for work coordination, and automatic process enactment and process improvement. Our approach to realising these facilities within a process centred software engineering environment is described, and our experiences using our event history based techniques during software development is reviewed.