Models of software development environments

A general model of software development environments that consists of structures, mechanisms, and policies is presented. The advantage of this model is that it distinguishes intuitively those aspects of an environment that are useful in comparing and contrasting software development environments. Four classes of environments-the individual, the family, the city. and the state-are characterized by means of a sociological metaphor based on scale. The utility of the taxonomy is that it delineates the important classes of interactions among software developers and exposes the ways in which current software development environments inadequately support the development of large systems. The generality of the model is demonstrated by its application to a previously published taxonomy that categorizes environments according to how they relate to language-centered, structure-oriented, toolkit, and method-based environments