Environments for cooperative systems development

Environments designed to support software engineering have historically provide little support for cooperative working. This work examines the nature of these environments and the ways in which they both support and inhibit cooperation in the software development process. We argue for the need to reconsider the nature of support environments and the particular features which a cooperative software development environment should exhibit. We present an architecture for a cooperative software development environment which supports software development through composition and reuse, which incorporates domain knowledge and which provides a lightweight mechanism for component communication. We also describe a prototype environment to support CSCW systems development which realizes this architecture