Cooperating transactions in a versioned database

EPOS (Expert system for PrOgram and System development) is a kernel software engineering environment, offering integrated software configuration management (CM) and process management. The EPOS process modelling (PM) support system runs on top of the versioned EPOS database (DB), operating in client-server mode. An extension of the EPOS PM is introduced for coping with cooperative, developing activities in an engineering environment. An EPOS DB transaction is connected to a change job or project activity (task). The cooperation model provides facilities for automatically or manually monitoring a set of evolving products, and negotiating to a protocol defining when/how changes will be both locally and globally propagated. The model also offers different policies for reconciliation of conflicting updates. The authors´ cooperation model is built on top of versioned EPOS DB and regulated by EPOS PM. It indicates a good coupling of CM and PM for handling cooperation in a software development environment