Globel Names: Support for Managing Software in a World of Virtual Organizationss

Abstract

Emerging technologies such as the Internet, the World Wide Web, Java™ technology, and software components are accelerating product life cycles and encouraging collaboration across organizational boundaries. The familiar coordination problems of large scale software development reappear in a context where tools used by collaborators must be less tightly coupled to one another than before. To the traditional notion of scale, based on the size of software systems, must be added a new dimension of scale: organizational complexity. Designing configuration management systems that scale well over both dimensions requires difficult trade-offs between reliability and flexibility. At the heart of these trade-offs is the aggregate information shared by collaborators: how it is represented, maintained, and understood by the people and tools using it. While designing a prototype development environment intended to scale in both dimensions, we have revisited the role played by naming. A proposed extension to the prototype’s naming system addresses issues such as which objects should be named and how the shared naming system is constructed.