Web assisted software engineering : a web-distributed CASE tool

Abstract

This project investigates the issues involved m exploiting the Internet for collaborative software development. The following report includes a research on traditional Software Engineering, WASE (Web-Assisted Software Engineering), collaborative development, CASE tools, software project management and webdistributed technologies. The objective of this project was to create a CASE tool that aids distributed software engineering through the medium of the Internet. Such a tool would then be used by globally distributed teams that are working on the same project. To address the mam challenges of W ASE the CASE tool provided web-distributed tools for communication, management and collaboration (file-sharing) facilities. The application was coded in Visual C#. Net 2003 and the following technologies were used to develop the application: ASP.Net Web Services, MySQL Server, MyODBC, XML, SOAP, TCP/IP sockets and UML. The results of the research showed that the web services were very efficient in distributing the management data on the web. In fact for management purposes only the tool could have also been developed on web pages. But the tool did not require management facilities only and therefore it was preferred to implement a web-distributed application to provide peer-to-peer communication too. Internet-enabled tools such as chatting and whiteboard freeware programs were integrated into the application to provide communication facilities. Although such tools provided audio and visual communication they can never be superior to every day life face-to-face communication. The application offered also a collaboration module that provided a file-sharing facility where each user can upload an artefact to the file server and/or download an artefact to his local repository. The users can then open and modify an artefact whenever it is appropriate for them.