Flexible support for cooperation in software development

Tasks carried out by different developers in the context of an overall activity like the development of a new release of a software product are usually not entirely independent. This is typically revealed by access conflicts on components of the product. A contract mechanism for solving such conflicts by managing the cooperation among developers is described. Testing and integration of successive versions produced by different tasks are other sources of difficulties, especially when errors result in complex interactions between developers for diagnosing and correcting them. The contract information is further used in a method for enforcing a consistent selection of the versions to be included in integration tests.Anglai