DAMOCLES-An evolutionary approach to design tracking

The authors describe the Damocles design tracking system. Design tracking systems provide the notion of a project-wide design state, and facilitates to query the design state. Damocles adopts an observer architecture for design tracking systems. The primary goal of an observer-based design tracking system is to introduce design tracking while not disturbing the existing design process. Instead of mediating between the designer and his environment to obtain tracking information. Damocles gets tracking information on the sly, by having tool wrappers sent it messages about what the designer is doing. The central component of Damocles, which manages the design state is the meta-data server. For a large, multi-person project, the Damocles architecture ends up being a distributed database comprised of numerous communicating meta-data servers, each observing a designer´s own workspace, with one dedicated to managing the project meta-data. Meta-data is communicated between servers to mirror data transfer during check-in and check-out. The Damocles architecture and prototype implementation details are described