ABSTRACT
The development of large software systems is a group activity and an accepted approach to supporting software development teams has by the provision of Software Engineering Environments. The ISM environment supports active tools and includes facilities to support cooperative working between software developers. The central key to the support of cooperation within the ISM environment is its interaction mechanism. Agents have consistent interaction interfaces with a particular set of messages causing particular classes of behaviour. The Mailer agent is the central component of interaction mechanism and is bases on concepts adopted from electronic message systems. The collation of messages is the basis of mailtray method. Conversation–based distribution is aims at supporting group activity in a tightly coupled manner and is aims at groups follows an established cooperation procedure, where a group is cooperating on the completion of a task whose solution path is understand.
