Management of Composites in Software Engineering Environments

.Design and development scalability, in any engineering, requires information hiding and a specific composition mechanism in which composite items are made-up of other items. This paper shows that scalability is currently ill supported and that software engineering composites are rather special with respect to other engineering disciplines. Indeed, a software engineering composite is simultaneously a model element, an engineering artifacts and a real object, which is unprecedented in the history of engineering. This paper analyzes the requirements that composites must satisfy in order to support scalability in software engineering. We have developed CADSE (Computer Aided Domain Specific Environment) in which composites are first class elements from which workspaces, concurrent engineering and view point support are provided. The paper discusses our experience with using the proposed system over the last years.