Models of software development environments

The authors present a general model of software development environments that consist of three components: policies, mechanisms, and structures. The advantage of this formalization is that it distinguishes precisely those aspects of an environment that are useful in comparing and contrasting software development environments. They introduce four classes of models by a sociological metaphor that emphasizes scale: the individual, the family, the city, and the state models. The authors argue that there is a qualitative difference between the interactions among a small, family project and a large, city project and that this qualitative difference requires a fundamentally different model of software development environments. They illustrate the city model with Inscape/Infuse and ISTAR