Prototyping a project master database for software engineering environments

Software Engineering Environments (SEE) have been determined as good means of increasing software productivity by shifting projects from the paper world into the automated world. An environment database has been identified as the core of any automated Software Engineering Environment. It should provide the means for accessing, storing and relating all the project's products, the means for automating the process by which these components are entered in this library, modified, controlled and disseminated, and the means for supporting “active databases 1 ”. The inherent complexity of building such a database is widely recognized. We have been studying issues associated with such an environment database, which we denote Project Master Data Base (PMDB), with the overall objective of defining, designing and developing a PMDB as an integrated part of a SEE. Due to the lack of explicit requirements for its design, a prototype of the PMDB was developed in order to gain information and experience on both the specifications of the PMDB itself and also on different implementation approaches. This paper discusses our prototyping exercise; it describes the prototype, how the problem reporting, evaluation, and tracking process was modeled, and some of the lessons learned as a result of this effort.