INTEGRATED SOFTWARE-DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENTS

Over the last fifteen years, a large number of products, projects and research contributions have tried to improve the tooling of software producers. This profusion of initiatives has split the knowledge and computer society into numerous specialized fields and groups. With respect to this situation, the integration question comes to the fore. This paper focuses on Integrated Software Development Environments. A taxonomy, based both on the integration technique and the genericity degree, is established and discussed. Then, the paper provides a detailed study of four questions the authors consider as key issues for the future : techniques for the generation of tools and environments, object bases, kernels for loosely coupled environments, definition and enaction of explicit software process models.