Remote and Distributed Software Engineering for cost-effective collaboration between the industry and research sector

 Braunschweig 10 Apr 99 Small and medium sized enterprises that are specialized in system and software design and engineering experience an urgent and growing need for an integrated software development environment based on different and highly advanced software engineering tools. The use of high performance networking (HPN) infrastructure and technology can provide the required quality of service to enhance and accelerate the collaborative engineering of complex software systems in distributed teams. The major goal of the REDISE project is to demonstrate the substantial advantages of a remote and distributed software engineering approach, based on the HPN principle. Both the software quality and the time to market are improved while significant costs can be saved in travelling time and efforts.

The REDISE demonstration constitutes an activity of the German Caprice Technology Transfer Node (TTN) and involves three partners, which are the German Aerospace Center (DLR), the Computing Center at Stuttgart University (RUS), and the German medium enterprise Aerodata, which is the manufacturer of the AeroNav aircraft navigation system. The collaborative software engineering environment is established through a net conferencing system, offering access and use for each team member at his own site and independent of the local infrastructure. The net conferencing participants communicate by audio, video, shared whiteboard and shared text editor and also apply shared software tools. Within the REDISE project, the German Aerospace Center and Aerodata use the collaborative environment while the Computing Center at the University of Stuttgart operates as a consultant for networking issues.

Remote access to computer aided software engineering (CASE) tools is of crucial importance to software designers, such as Aerodata. New product inventions, based on complex software development and implementation, require the assistance of expensive CASE tools as well as static and dynamic source code analysis tools. This equipment is only available in specialized research centres, such as the German Aerospace Center. The product tests and assessments are primarily focused on safety and quality control and equally call for real time applications. Therefore, additional support from and co-operation with experts in software engineering and quality assurance are more than welcome. In order to stay competitive, the small and medium sized enterprises in all sectors of the economy simply cannot do without any help from remote and distributed engineering and consultancy.

These are exactly the kind of services that the high performance networking technology is able to offer to the industry. HPN not only allows the software developer to dispose of the computer aided software engineering tools and infrastructure of the advanced research centres but also to communicate as well as to co-operate with their experienced experts. As a result, enormous savings can be made within the small and medium sized enterprises through the use of the underlying HPN infrastructure in conjunction with the net conferencing communication and collaboration middleware. Thus, software engineering infrastructure investments are reduced to 50%, travel time and budget are lowered with 60% while consulting and training expenses are lessened with 30%. Saving through sharing indeed leads to spectacular but very realistic cost-effectiveness for European system designers.

For more information, check in at: caprice.dlr.de/redise/

Leslie Versweyveld