Cooperation

The main cooperation aspects are identified in [BJP94]:

Collaboration

demands that involved agents share common data/ information, and is often based on a shared database to handle access to, and storage of software artifacts.

Communication

refers to the exchange of information and messages among agents. It usually follows a (set of) specified protocol(s).

Coordination

means the adjustment of agents' work towards a common goal. This happens through an explicit process model to manage organization, evolution and consistency of the whole software project.

The most obvious starting point when trying to add cooperation support to an SCM system is to focus on software objects and access to these. Most SCM systems have a shared database of software objects, and use some mechanism to synchronize object access. Few systems provide facilities for communication between users or for user coordination at a higher level than object access. With this focus in mind, we would expect that further cooperation support will be concerned with communication about the objects managed by the system and that declaration of activities that need coordination are centered around the object they will access.