This year we built a federation of collaboration tools tied together through shared data. That is, no tool was allowed to directly talk to another tool. Instead they have access to persistant state of all the other tools through a data manager. This makes adding a new tool very simple since its affect is seen through changes to the state of the shared data, not by coding a new interface to the new tool. There is a potential downside to this, of course, because the power of shared data can cause chaos if not handled with discipline.

We concluded that as long as we treat the database table structure and types as interfaces - that is, we try very hard to get them right the first time and not change them - then this architecture is very effective. We did have our share of difficulties but the integration process was effective and the system performed flawlessly at Qualification.

All the tools are composed of client parts and server parts that communicate through socket and webservice message-passing channels that provide a message handling core, used by all the tools. They also all use services of a data manager that provides mapping from messages to stored procedure invocations and results back to messages.

The Developers of this system are the students enrolled in CSE784 - Software Studio, during the Fall of 2007. This system was specified, designed, implemented, tested, integrated, and qualified in a period of 9 weeks. The qualification test consisted of the verification of approximately 300 requirements via approximately 100 carefully written test procedures. The system was qualified, in a little more than eight hours, on December 7th, 2007.