Collaboration and coordination in process-centered software development environments: a review of the literature

Process-centered software development environments are systems that provide automated support for software development activities.Such environments mediate the efforts of potentially large groups of developers working on a common project. This mediation is based on runtime support for actual work performance based on formal representations of work.In the present work, we survey and assess the contributions of the software process literature under the perspective of support for collaboration and coordination. A broad range of alternative approaches to various aspects of representation and runtime support are identified, based on the analysis of an expressive number of systems. The identified functionality can serve both as a guide for the evaluation and selection of systems of this kind as well as a roadmap for the development of new, improved systems.