What happened to integrated environments? (panel session)

Abstract

20 years ago, in 1979, a landmark community-wide process was launched to establish notional requirements for software engineering environments. The resulting Stoneman document was published in February 1980. Bred of the software engineering research community and catalyzed by the Government Ada sponsor, this integrated environment branched out and was embraced widely in the software engineering community in the 1980's as a needed, achievable, centrist approach to accelerate the benefits of disciplined software engineering into mainstream practice. The CASE tool industry bloomed as products integrating lifecycle activities and artifacts emerged, and research evolved to environments by support for emerging, maturing notions of software processes. Yet, at the end of the 1990's, this movement appears to have virtually died, and more and more production software organizations are instead (or again) using old-fashioned stand-alone development tools and struggling to match up tools and their outputs and inputs to do software engineering. The purpose of this panel is to explore the reasons why the environment movement has retreated, whether the recent tools and methods are or are not achieving the goals of environments, whether those goals have been superceded by other goals better served without environments, and what these examinations indicate about future requirements and research needs.