Replacing copies with connections: managing software across the virtual organization

The Internet, the World Wide Web, Java/sup TM/ technology, and software components are changing the software business. Activities traditionally constrained by the need for intense information management increasingly involve cooperating organizations. Information management tools and techniques do not scale well in the face of this organizational complexity. Informal sharing, based largely on manual copying of information, cannot meet the demands of the task as size and complexity increase. Formal approaches to sharing information are based on groupware tools, but cooperating organizations do not always enjoy the trust or commonality of sophisticated infrastructure, methods, and skills that this approach requires. The application web is a simple, loosely coupled, highly flexible strategy for information sharing that bridges the gap. Extensive information relevant to different parts of the software life cycle is interconnected in a simple, easily described way; such connections permit selective information sharing by a variety of tools and in a variety of collaboration modes that vary in the amount of organizational coupling they require.