Technical Issues in the Design of a Virtual Software Corporation

The Esprit VISCOUNT project was formed by a consortium of European industrial and academic partners. It seeks to exploit emerging distributed object technologies to develop a Virtual Software Corporation (VSC) a geographically distributed software development environment populated with the next generation of CSCW software engineering tools. The central technical objective of the VISCOUNT project which will meet the partners’ business objectives is: to develop configuration management tool integration for use in a VSC. VISCOUNT also considers WWW integration, process modelling and metrics collection. Possible strategies towards solving these problems are outlined in terms of existing technological capabilities, support for incorporating existing technologies into federative distributed applications, and the theory and practice of distributed CSCW software engineering. It is argued that WWW and CORBA are an ideal basis for integrating existing configuration management, current process technology, metrics and CASE technology to support the requirements of VSCs.