Developing a Web-Based Cooperative Environment to Software Project Development

Introduction

Software intensive systems such as airspace, telecommunication and stock systems are the systems where software is their main part. In other words, daily efforts of present-day people increasingly depended on the systems in which software plays the main role. Development of such systems without collaborative effort is a difficult task. However, bringing together the scattered collaborators under a same roof is an obstacle to collaborate. Distance between collaborates, acclimatization of collaborators to their environment and their familiarities with own tools are some restrictions of physical gathering. World Wide Web has brought down the restrictions by providing a distance communication among the people.

Although Web has facilitated distance and virtual collaboration among the people, it wants more capabilities. This chapter aims to present a framework to furnish the capabilities on the Web. To this end we should:

• 1.

  Create a social network among people is distributed through the web, and

• 2.

  Manage artifacts created by collaborators.

The framework aims to provide an environment to support software product from idea to the production maintenance on the Web. The environment:

• 1.

  Obviates organizational hindrances existing in the way of collaboration.

• 2.

  Enables the end user to participate in analyzing requirements.

• 3.

  Enables the involved expert people to examine, recognize and document problem and to present recommendations for production.

• 4.

  Enables distribution of software and reduces costs needed to complete the production.

In fact, Web-based collaborative software development is a new kind of social effort in a virtual organization that is not limited to certain geographical locations and membership. However, the present-day Web is used to read and review information and so has no enough qualifications to fulfill the aim of social network of software development. Synthesis and production of software intensive systems, design of industrial products, authoring books and technical documents are typical teamwork include a common purpose, a common data space, collaboration tool and involved people.

Consider Figure 1. The first part is responsible for supporting: users’ activity consisting of constructing and modifying their documents using tools like Web browsers and some mechanism to simultaneous access to the documents. The second part: is responsible for supporting the communication between Web users and artifacts management system (AMS) and includes the artifacts management system. The system including a repository for users’ documents, manages relation among them. Figure 2 shows more detail of the proposed framework and Table 1 shows tasks of each part.

Figure 1.

Web-based collaboration

Figure 2.

The proposed framework