Preface Preface

Large software projects involve a number of people who have to collaborate and coordinate their efforts in order to assure that the work progresses according to plans and that the individuals work with the same goal in mind. However, contemporary development tools traditionally offer little support for groups and hence do little or nothing to help avoiding these problems. Based on a number of empirical studies done by researchers within different fields, this thesis contains a description of the design process as a collaborative activity. With this background information in mind, different groupware technologies are investigated in order to find those interesting in a collaborative design setting. By combining the knowledge gained from the study of the design process and from the study of available groupware functionality, a framework for how CASE tools can support groups is presented. This framework is based on the three-level framework proposed by Vessey and Sravanapudi, but is extended with more functionality, escpecially at the task level and at the groupware level. CASE tools integrating the proposed features will hopefully contribute to more successful projects in the future because this merging of technologies will improve development tools’ ability to support groups of people doing collaborative design. In order to find to which degree today’s CASE tools offer support for collaboration, the world wide web was used for searching for interesting products. CASE tools that claimed they offer group support were further examined to find the degree of support and each vendor were then contacted for obtaining more details on their CASE tool. Based on the analyses of web pages and email replies from vendors, the different tools were evaluated with respect to the proposed framework. The results show that even many vendors seem to be aware of the importance of group support, only a few of them offer any collaboration support other than support at the database level. Few of the products offer any support for communication and the tools are still asynchronous tools and offer little or no support for synchronous collaboration. However, only three vendors returned details regrading their products, and these replies indicate that CASE tools contain more support for collaboration than presented at their web sites.