On supporting large-scale decentralized software engineering processes

The life cycle of large-scale software systems requires the cooperative effort of teams of people over extended periods of time. Automated support for the communication and coordination involved in this cooperative effort requires the existence of an active information base through which all activities of the software life cycle can be mediated. The design of this active information base is presented in terms of an intelligent software hypertext system (Ishys) which: (1) supports a flexible and general-purpose model for information management (hypertext), and (2) can support various software life cycle models based on an agents-tasks-products perspective