A distributed environment to support cooperative software development

Cooperative environments to support Software Development (CSD) have as main goal to enable several users connected over network to work together in order to develop software. They have to solve problems such as: coherence maintenance of the software project through the distributed system by managing possible conflicts between local versions of each group member and promote the necessary mechanisms for the inter-group awareness and integrity. We introduce in this paper a distributed solution to support CSD by describing our own prototype: a Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) architecture for software development. It enables a group of developers (2 to 4), possibly located at remote places and connected over network, to develop software together. A cooperative multimedia editing environment is available during the development cycle, enclosing mechanisms of computer-conferencing (text, audio and video communications)