Software engineering environments are critical in reducing the costs of programming, from the early phases of rapid prototype generation through-the maintenance of released products. However, most software engineering environments are concerned primarily with the artifacts of programming, rather than with the process of software development. They provide tools to edit files and to record the module structure of a program; they do not coordinate the activities of programmers working together on a project nor record the structure of their responsibilities. Supporting the process of software development requires the ability to track the activities of a project, to aid official communication between project members, and to interpret stated rules of project organization. Moreover, because software engineering environments are large and complicated programs, they themselves are expensive to develop, maintain, and modify. This proposal suggest that there is a connection between the inflexibility of current software engineering environments and their neglect of communication and coordination, and it advocates incorporating computational models of activities, messages, and organizational rules into future environments. The facilities that we propose not only support the process of software development, but also are a basis for defining and evolving a family of software engineering environments with reusable components.
