Distributed Objects for Concurrent Engineering

The growing size of Software Engineering teams (up to a thousand people), combined with shrinking software life cycle duration (a few months) have created considerable pressure to increase concurrency. Concurrent work in Software Engineering. leads to find the same “object” simultaneously in multiple copies, locations and formats. Concurrent engineering support means the definition, control and automation of all these copies and how cooperative work policies are defined and managed. We believe the paper contributes in two ways, first in showing that the SCM community has to break with some traditional approaches, if scalability and efficiency issues really are of concern; secondly that the approach we propose is a step toward making a new service available on top of conventional middleware (CORBA like), which could constitute a new and wide commercial field for SCM vendors.