Technische Universität München
Institut für Informatik I1
D-85748 Garching b. München
Germany

Office 01.07.053
Tel: +49 (89) 289-18234

In software engineering projects, different models are needed to support the activities of different participants. For example, requirements can be written in terms of a use case model and nonfunctional requirements. The detailed design of a component can be represented in terms of a class model. Models allow participants to reason about the system using a simplified abstraction. In any realistic project, however, models themselves can become complex and difficult to maintain, as they change and overlap, diverting increasingly large project resources towards documentation and model maintenance.

Agile projects address this issue by minimizing the size and number of models to maintain. Models are used only when needed, as short term support for collaboration or as overview. Otherwise, most design knowledge is either embedded into the source code or exchanged among participants directly, for example, during peer reviews or frequent demostrations to the client.

While agile methods have proven successful dealing with rapid change for single site development projects, they do not transfer easily into a geographically distributed environment. Not only models are needed to support the transfer knowledge between sites, other information, such as justification of decisions, current issues, and project status also need to be made explicit.

Sysiphus provides a unified modeling and collaboration environment aimed at addressing the above issues while retaining the essence of agile methods in a geographically distributed environment.

ARENA is game independent in the sense that organizers can adapt a new game to the ARENA game interface, upload it to the ARENA server, and announce and conduct tournaments with players and spectators located anywhere on the Internet. Organizers can also define new tournament styles, describing how players are mapped to a set of matches and how to compute an overall ranking of players by adding up their victories and losses (and hence, figuring out who won the tournament).

ARENA has been developed as a companion example for the book Object-Oriented Software Engineering. Our goal is to provide a non-trivial and living example for software engineering education. With ARENA, an instructor can cover technical topics (e.g., access control, concurrency control, dynamic class loading), and methodological topics (e.g applying design patterns, specifying contracts). ARENA can also be used for supporting project courses in which students extend or refine the system.