Mechanisms and Policies for Federated PSEEs: Basic Concepts and Open Issues

In the past years there has been a significant trend towards the establishment of distributed software development activities, where different organizations cooperate to develop a composite software product. This trend originates in the geographical distribution of many companies, quite often spread over different countries and even continents. Another motivation for this phenomenon relates to the increasing number of projects that are carried out by consortia or clusters of companies, each of them contributing with specific expertise to the final result. This scenario demands for improved software development technology that is able to support both the software development process at each local site, and the global interaction of the different organizations. In particular, process technology must be able to guarantee the autonomy of each site as far as the local software development process, practices, and artifacts are concerned. At the same time, it must be able to superimpose a coordinating process across all organizations to consistently drive the distributed development activity. The issue is critical for the effectiveness of process technology in an industrial context. In this paper we provide a discussion of the issue and propose a tentative research agenda for the next years.