This research is funded under the Special Initiative on Coordination theory and Collaboration Technology. This is one of eleven winners under that competition. Traditional support for coordinating the activities of collaborative software engineers consists mainly of version control and mail systems and does not meet the requirements of many software engineering tasks such as interactive group design and debugging. In this project the researchers investigate flexible coordination of the activities of cooperating software engineers. In particular, they develop an approach allowing: (1) a range of concurrency control mechanisms including serial transaction, concurrent serializable transactions, concurrent non-serializable transactions allowing other transactions to access various types of partial results, and not control; (2) alerters automatically informing users of events in which they are interested; (3) dynamic variable-grained locking, and (4) live sound integrated with the concurrency control mechanism. In the development of the approach, the researchers use results from the work done in shared windows, long transactions, distributed interactive systems, and other systems. The researchers also study how a particular scheme can be automatically chosen by the system based on a minimum performance level requested by the user. Several prototype applications will be developed to demonstrate the novel aspects of this research.
