Towards synchronous collaborative software engineering

CAISE, a collaborative software engineering architecture, provides extensible real-time support for collaboration between participating tools and users. The architecture maintains a semantic project model constructed incrementally from software artifacts as they are developed; this model is used to determine the impact of changes at a semantic level. This information is relayed to developers, providing them with awareness of others´ locations, and alerting them to potential conflicts and the need for closer collaboration. We use examples from CAISE-based tools to illustrate the potential of real-time collaborative software engineering to enhance awareness of other developers´ actions.