Software Engineering Environments: International Workshop on Environments, Chinon, France, September 18-20, 1989. Proceedings

This volume gives the proceedings of an international workshop on software engineering environments and public tool interfaces. The workshop drew together the recognized experts in these fields from Europe and America. The workshop examined the mechanisms necessary to support the software process and some formalisms for software modeling and considered which mechanisms and capabilities are feasible in the short term. Important here are the communication and coordination requirements of teams of people, especially information flow and access issues and the characterization of project and organization structure that interact with these. Some recent work on "long" transactions is included here. There was discussion of how tools obtain access to services provided by other tools in the environment and how they communicate and exchange information. The workshop considered the trade-off between ease of interoperability and the modification of existing tools. Data typing and structuring models present a significant challenge. Included here is the experience of using actual models and an analysis of "persistence". The users of an environment may act in various roles and the needs of each type of user vary. Discussions centered on designs of environment mechanisms to support the user interface, including the issues of uniformity and performance.