CASDE: An environment for collaborative software development

Collaborative software development is called for to meet the requirement of the increasingly expanding software scale. A more advanced software development environment is needed to support the collaborative software development activity. The contribution of this paper is an architecture of process-centered context-aware software development environment, called CASDE, which effectively supports the collaborative development activity. We first discuss the software development activity using activity theory, and highlight its collaborative features. We then present the architecture of CASDE with a brief introduction to its key elements. The focus of the architecture lies in its support to the three levels of collaboration, i.e., co-ordinated level, cooperative level, and co-constructive level. Due to its supportive and integrated nature, the architecture can support collaboration effectively. CASDE is believed to be able to play a positive role in supporting the collaborative software development activity and improving the quality of software systems.