Managing Coordination and Cooperation in Distributed Software Processes: the GENESIS Environment

We present the GENESIS platform (GEneralised eNvironment for procEsS management in cooperative Software engineering), the outcome of a research project aiming at designing and developing a noninvasive and open-source system to support software engineering processes in a highly distributed environment. The system supports the cooperation and coordination in software processes as its process modeling language enables the decomposition of complex processes into subprocesses that can be distributed and executed at different organizational sites. In GENESIS, workflow management technologies have been integrated with artifact management and communication services to meet the necessary requirements of managing the cooperation among distributed teams. Its strengths are a powerful activity management, covering all the main aspects of the life cycle of an activity; an efficient and flexible project monitoring, collecting productivity and quality metrics to show on-demand snapshots of the whole process and of its parts at different levels of detail, and a careful consideration of the process evolution questions, allowing to adequately manage the most common exceptions happening during process execution in a simple and flexible way. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.