Workspace Management: Supporting Cooperative Work

This paper introduces a mechanism coping with cooperative work in developing and maintaning software artifacts in a multi-user engineering environment. For the long time it has been a problem to handle parallel activities on shared or interdependent products. The required mechanism must be sufficiently flexible to support concurrent updates so that none of new updates will be lost, nor lots of work will be rejected and restarted. This problem may be resolved by providing a sophisticated way for cooperating between consistent set of objects (workspaces). This mechanism has been prototyped in the EPOS 1 . EPOS offers integrated software configuration management (CM) and process management. The EPOS process modelling (PM) support system runs on top of the versioned EPOS database (EPOSDB), operating in client-server mode. Keywords: Software Engineering Environment, Cooperative Work, Workspace Management 1 Introduction Software engineering activities are characterized by accessing large..