DesignSpace - An Infrastructure for Multi-User/Multi-Tool Engineering

The engineering and maintenance of large (software) systems is an inherently collaborative process that involves diverse engineering teams, heterogeneous development artifacts, and different engineering tools. While teams have to collaborate continuously and their artifacts are often related, the tools they use are nearly always independent, single-user applications. These tools range from programming to modeling tools and cover a wide range of engineering disciplines. However, relations among the artifacts across these tools often remain undocumented and are handled in an adhoc manner. Keeping these artifacts in sync continues to be a key engineering challenge. In this paper, we present our vision of the DesignSpace, a novel engineering infrastructure for integrating diverse development artifacts and their relations. The DesignSpace supports distributed collaboration, a wide range of tools and development, maintenance , and evolution services including incremental consistency checking and transformation.