Process, space and software development support

Over the past five years we have been actively investigating support frameworks for collaborative software development. Our goal has been the development of an open framework for support of collaborative work activities which provides active guidance and help to the user and allows for dynamic modification of collaboration protocols as work situations evolve. In this position paper we outline our current thinking on support frameworks for the collaborative efforts of teams of software developers. We postulate that a space-based metaphor for collaborative systems opens the door to the design and construction of families of next-generation software process environments which are open in that many different kinds of processes can be specified significantly more flexible than existing systems in their affordances for evolution of process models, and provide integrated support for both formal and informal collaborative activities of their users