Improving the Development Tool Chain in the Context of Petri Net-Based Software Development

Modern, collaborative software development projects are highly supported by a variety of tools. Aside from the pure code development that is nowadays well supported by integrated development environments (IDEs) such as Eclipse, also other activities receive increasing attention in the matter of tool support. Recent improvements in tool support for source code management (SCM), process management and documentation management are driven by the changing demands of increasing distribution and agility of development projects. Moreover, the integration of tool support systems into integrated project management environments (IPMEs) increase the usefulness of each emerging tool support, especially for agile approaches. The Petri net-based agent-oriented software engineering (Paose) is highly influenced by agile methods and combines the agile concepts with aspects from model driven development. We have achieved increased efficiency by the adoption of IPMEs into the Paose development approach. However, the introduced tool set integration lacks in support for the model driven part of Paose, i.e. the tool integration for graphical (model-based) source code is missing. In this work we present an approach for an appropriate tool support of agile methods and model driven development. As a prototypical implementation of the concepts we present a Web service-based framework and plugin-based extension for Redmine as representative of open source IPMEs, which is currently in use in the context of the Paose approach.