Panel discussion on Architectures for Tool Integration

The software development process consists of a variety of
interrelated phased. Each phase is supported by some methodology
and specialized development tools. The variety of the activities
as well as the low level interoperability among
 tools often discourage the co-operation of the teams involved in the
development process. This causes high development costs and,
moreover, the overall quality of the produced software is reduced
by low orchestration support. Integration of existing development
tools has been recognized as one part of the solution to this
problem. The design of Integrated Development Environments and the
definition of mechanisms for tool integration is still a
challenging research issue for software engineering.

Recently, a number of innovative technologies such us JXTA, .NET,
SOAP, WEB and Grid Services have been developed. Although they
have been designed for rather different purposes these
technologies can be exploited for building integrated and
extensible architectures of software development tools.

The goal of this panel is to present and discuss on-going work and
to set up a research agenda in this area. We will address two main
questions.

- Is there a sound conceptual basis for tool integration,

- Which technologies better meet the demands of tool integration.