Challenges in Collaboration: Tool Chain Enables Transparency Beyond Partner Borders

Abstract

This paper shows how the tool chain supports efficient use of resources and transparency through partners in collaborative software development. Tool chain also improves the requirements tracing during the software development lifecycle.

Generally in software development, there is a need to link the requirements to the corresponding design artefacts, to the resulting software and associated test cases. Traceability enables, for instance, the efficient change impact analysis and reporting facilities at the different phases of the software development life cycle. In collaboration, traceability is an enormous challenge for successful development. Efficient use of resources in collaboration is also problematic caused by different time zones, various tools and lack of real-time synchronization of data items. In addition, common understanding of requirements without transparency between companies is seen as one of the typical problems in collaboration.

The paper gives a solution to the challenges above by defining the integrated tool environment to support collaborative SW development. Tool chain provides mechanism to manage resources and tasks efficiently and offers consistent view to the product artefacts in real-time. Tool chain integrates project management, requirements management, configuration management and testing tools.