Towards collaboration-centric pattern-based software development support

Abstract

Software engineering activities tend to be loosely coupled to allow for flexibly reacting to unforeseen development complexity, requirements changes, and progress delays. This flexibility comes a the price of hidden dependencies among design and code artifacts that make it difficult or even impossible to assess change impact. Incorrect change propagation subsequently results in costly errors. This position paper proposes a novel approach based on monitoring engineering activities for subsequent high-level pattern detection. Patterns of (i) collaboration structures, (ii) temporal action sequences, and (iii) artifact consistency constraints serve as input to recommendation and automatic reconfiguration algorithms for ultimately avoiding and correcting artifact inconsistencies.