Um mecanismo de atualização de ferramentas para um ambiente de desenvolvimento distribuído de software

Abstract

Although the Distributed Software Development (DSD) introduced several competitive advantages, also emerged constraints imposed by geographic distances, languages, culture diversities and so on. To assist collaboration in DSD, computer systems which offer software development support, maintenance and improvement are used to control the activi ties. The Distributed Software Development Environments (DSDE) are composed of these computational systems, whose goal is to support the collaborative work in a productive manner, aiding on idea communications, resource sharing and work efforts coordination. Besides that, these environments require updates of the available resources, such as bug corrections and in this case new additional features and functionalities. Thus, it becomes necessary to give a suitable support of resource automated updates in a development environment. So, this thesis presents a mechanism that aims deal with the update process in a Distributed Software Development Environment, consequently minimizing its update problems without the requirement of the user's environment instance to be stopped and restarted during this process. In addition, a service to manage the environment's tool repository is inserted in the mechanism, centralizing its accessing and ensure that a user can exploit just the assigned modules to his/her profile. The major contributions from this thesis are: update's notification by the environment; human interaction is not necessary in the update process and it allows monitoring each tool in user's workspace.