A CSCW environment to engineer quality in software products

The growing complexity of software products has created an increasing interest in quality control issues. Traditional approaches defer quality control to the late phases of the lifecycle (the validation and testing phases), when it is too late to correct potential problems. This paper proposes an approach to engineer quality in software products since the early phases of the lifecycle. The approach is based on the use of a CSCW environment that improves cooperation and collaboration among software development teams, with the effect of increasing the number of quality control interactions, and reducing the number of costly fix-it long iterations, thus improving quality and reducing time and cost.