Updating semantic information to support coordination in distributed software development environments

The authors address the coordination problem that arises when a group of people develop software products cooperatively under distributed environments. They present a framework for applying attribute grammars to construct distributed software environments. In the framework, a class of software products and their semantic information are specified in a rule-based and functional way. A software product instance and its associated information are represented as a set of attributed subtrees which are distributed across workstations. A data structure called internal compressed dependency graph and a distributed attribute evaluation algorithm are introduced for realizing efficient and fault-tolerant information updating. Since the framework tolerates network failures, the cooperative development can be carried out even when the connecting network is unreliable