Generalised environment for process management in cooperative software engineering

In this paper we present an open source platform supporting distributed software engineering processes, which is currently under development in the GENESIS project (generalised environment for process management in cooperative software engineering). It supports the definition, enactment and control of software processes in a distributed manner and the formal and informal communication among distributed software engineer teams using workflow and document management technologies. We make use of software agents as technological glue to control and monitor the activities execution at different sites (low invasive approach). The highly flexible process definition language allows the project manager to define a software process at different levels of detail supporting both iterative refinement and on the fly activities flow modification.