Supporting Mutual Understanding between Heterogenous Documents

Concurrent Engineering supports the cooperation of teams coming from different phases of the engineering process. Mutual understanding between these crossfunctional teams is essential for successful cooperation. One obstacle for mutual understanding is the use of different languages, notations, and representations within different phases of the engineering process. Fine-grained relationships between documents and parts of documents are demanded as well as intelligent visualizations techniques. A concept is presented which describes engineering processes as “coupling of views”. Based on this concept we have developed CoDecide. CoDecide supports the development and implementation of interfaces between documents in the flavor of the House-of-Quality. These interfaces help to identify and maintain interrelations between documents. As CoDecide supports different kind of cooperation modi, the interfaces serve as a central forum of discussion and cooperation. Interfaces have been integrated in two environments. First, CoDecide is coupled with a CAD-tool to support factory-layout-planning. CoDecide is used to bring face-to-face quantitative and qualitative goals with single design alternatives. Moreover, negotiation is supported between different designers which work on different tasks in the same layout. Second, CoDecide is used to support the integration of heterogenous documents in requirements engineering. Informal hypertext documents, semi-formal SAand ER-diagrams, and formal specification are represented in a common knowledgebase. Different kind of dependencies enable the expression of relations between documents. CoDecide supports the visualization of the documents as well as their interrelations.