A modified development process for distributed systems

Abstract

Distributed systems are increasing their presence in daily activities, such as shopping with Visa card or withdrawing money from a cash machine, and their complexity. This situation suggests special attention when distributed systems are considered. Their inherent characteristics affect directly not only the obtained software, but also to the development process followed. The main problems in the development of this kind of system are the partition of the software and the allocation of the identified software fragments to the existing locations, to allow the system to work optimally and as a whole. In order to take into account these new aspects, a new process should be applied. This implies the definition of new stages within the development cycle, new definition of the existing ones, and definition of strategies for the partition and allocation tasks. This paper proposes the first draft of a method, which takes distribution explicitly into account. A particular project using this process is briefly presented too.