Managing Development of Very Large Systems: Implications for Integrated Environment Architectures

Version and configuration control are mechanisms for managing source code and system builds. In the development of very large systems, built by large teams, development management is the dominant factor. In this paper we examine management support for development through integrated environments and investigate the implications for environment architectures. We do so by defining a project scenario that is to be performed with integrated project support environments. The scenario has been carefully designed to not only determine the scope of management functionality provided by a particular environment, but also to probe implications for the architecture of environments. The implications discussed in this paper are: focus on user activities; the integration of project management and development support concepts; the ability to reinforce and avoid conflict with particular organizational models; the ability to support evolution and change of the product, environment, and organization; and the capability for adaptation and insertion into a work environment. The scenario is part of a methodology for evaluation of environments currently used at the Software Engineering Institute.