Difficulties in integrating multiview development systems

Drawbacks of current approaches to integrating multiple perspectives in a development environment are discussed. An integrated environment is defined as one in which a dynamic collection of tools can work together on a single system so that changes made to the system by one tool can be seen by other tools, and integration criteria are set forth. Five representative approaches to systems integration-shared file systems, selective broadcasting, simple databases, view-oriented databases, and canonical representation-are examined, and their relative strengths and weaknesses are summarized. None of the integration mechanisms is shown to be uniformly superior to the others. The issue of environment evolution and its effect on integration is addressed.<>