UBILAB Technical Report 94.9.1 Computer Supported Cooperative Software Engineering with Beyond-Sniff

ion level. It visualizes differences with colors and pictograms on project, symbolic and textual levels and there are several abstraction levels on which both symbolic and textual differences can be browsed. Figure 4 shows the TurboMixer in comparing three working projects of consecutive revisions, ordered by age from left to right. The structure of every working project is visualized as a tree and the classes are listed above them. New, changed, and deleted elements are visualized the same way in the tree and in the list. The semantics of the pictograms and colors is described in the lower left corner. Figure 4. TurboMixer visualizing differences in structure and classes 3.3 Related Work In the area of CSCW there is a large number of published synchronous approaches such as synchronous editing of documents and video conferencing but there are no approaches that have achieved a relevant level of practical application besides video conferencing systems. Dewan proposes in [Dew93] to apply different synchronous approaches such as synchronous editing and debugging to cooperative software engineering. This approach, however, does not address the relevant problems of cooperative software engineering, as discussed in Section 2. Some programming environments such as Cadillac [Gab90] and Field [Rei90b] already incorporate annotations. In contrast to our approach their annotation concepts are simplistic means for connecting some information with source code. They are tool specific and cover only a small part of the artifacts. Moreover, these environments are aimed at single developers. We do not know about tools similar to TurboMixer. Only Grass describes in [Gra92] similar concepts and ideas.