A Critical Review of the Current State of IPSE Technology

In the past ten years there has been a great deal of interest in the concept of an Integrattd Project Support Environment (IPSE) as a complete, unifying framework of services supporting most (or all) phases of software development and maintenance. In this paper we evaluate the current state of research work in this area, suggest some reasons for the relative lack of success, and make proposals for ensuring measured progress in the future. The concept of an Integrated Project Support Environment (IPSE)1 was developed in the late 1970's and early 1980's in response to a recognition that the traditional notion of a set of program development tools (editor. compiler, debugger) is only a small :omponent of a much larger set of facilities required to coordinate the many tasks involved in large-scale software production. While various descriptions of many of the concepts are available, in many ways the seminal work on IPSEs and IPSE architecture is the Stoneman report[6, 7J defining the architecture of an Ada Programming Support Environment (APSE). Attempts at defining an architecture for a project support environment have been greatly influenced by this work. In that report a basic 'Also variously called a Software Development Environment (SDE), Software Engineering Environment (SEE). and Integrated Software Factory (ISF).