Multiuser collaborative work in virtual environment based CASE tool

Abstract

VRCASE is a virtual environment based Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tool. It provides a 3D multiuser collaborative software modeling environment with automatic object-class abstraction, class diagram generation, and C++ skeleton generation facilities for assisting Object-Oriented software development. It allows multiple concurrent users to model software system collaboratively. To achieve efficient collaborative software development in VRCASE, we have proposed and implemented a Fine-grained locking and notification mechanism together with visual indicators to maintain system consistency among multiple concurrent users. The system evaluation shows that our approach can effectively support multiuser collaborative software design in VRCASE.

Introduction

There exist a wide range of Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools to support different methods and different stages of the software development lifecycle [1], [2], [3]. CASE tools make the software architecture and design clearer and easier to be understood and modified because users are enabled to abstract away from the entanglement of the source codes. The graphic notation makes the communication among the software development teams easier and the skeleton code generation motivates development teams to construct a good design before coding. Some CASE tools may also support roundtrip engineering with the ability of keeping model and code consistent and the ability of deriving class diagrams or database models from source codes. However, a fundamental characteristic of many software systems is that they are very large and far beyond the ability of any individual to create or even understand in detail. Developing a complex software system requires the collaboration of software team members, thus software engineering is no longer the preserve of individuals but essentially a team-based activity involving a wide variety of software engineers. Actually, it has been estimated that system developers typically spend 70% of their time in working with others and these activities account for 85% of the cost of the large software system [4]. Unfortunately, traditional software engineering environments provide limited support to permit concurrent software engineering.

In this research work, a multiuser collaborative environment is proposed and developed to support the collaborative software development in Virtual Reality based CASE tool. An effective concurrency control mechanism is proposed to address the system consistency issue. In the following sections, we will discuss the VRCASE system architecture in Section 2, followed by the proposed concurrency control mechanism and its implementation in Section 3 before presenting the system evaluation results in Section 4. Finally, the conclusions are drawn in Section 5.