Collaborative Software Engineering

Collaboration among individuals – from users to developers – is central to modern software engineering. It takes many forms: joint activity to solve common problems, negotiation to resolve conflicts, creation of shared definitions, and both social and technical perspectives impacting all software development activity. The difficulties of collaboration are also well documented. The grand challenge is not only to ensure that developers in a team deliver effectively as individuals, but that the whole team delivers more than just the sum of its parts.

The editors of this book have assembled an impressive selection of authors, who have contributed to an authoritative body of work tackling a wide range of issues in the field of collaborative software engineering. The resulting volume is divided into four parts, preceded by a general editorial chapter providing a more detailed review of the domain of collaborative software engineering. Part 1 is on "Characterizing Collaborative Software Engineering", Part 2 examines various "Tools and Techniques", Part 3 addresses organizational issues, and finally Part 4 contains four examples of "Emerging Issues in Collaborative Software Engineering".

As a result, this book delivers a comprehensive state-of-the-art overview and empirical results for researchers in academia and industry in areas like software process management, empirical software engineering, and global software development. Practitioners working in this area will also appreciate the detailed descriptions and reports which can often be used as guidelines to improve their daily work.

Ivan Mistrík is an independent consultant for software-intensive systems engineering. He has 40 years experience in both software and systems engineering as an information systems developer, R&D leader, research analyst, and ICT management consultant. He is the author or co-author of more than 80 articles and papers in international journals, conferences, books and workshops.

John Grundy has published widely in the area of software tools, including a range of novel contributions to collaboration supporting software tools. These include software process modelling and enactment tools, synchronous and asynchronous editing tools, component repositories, and various collaborative design tools. In particular he has focused on developing architectures and meta-tools to support rapid development and deployment of collaboration-supporting tools.

André van der Hoek has authored and co-authored over 70 journal and conference publications, and is a co-author of the Configuration Management impact report, a recent retrospective view of research and industry advances in the essential collaborative technology of configuration management. His research focuses on understanding and advancing the role of design, coordination, and education in software.

Jim Whitehead has created and led the Internet Engineering Task Force Working Group on Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV), and participated in the creation of the DeltaV follow-on standard for versioning and configuration management.