Automated monitoring of events that occur in a computer network is essential for non-intrusive software process enactment.Relevant events include modification of product artifacts like source files and documents, and execution and termination of tool invocations.Monitoring these events requires capturing the context in which they occur and constraining the monitoring to relevant events only.We introduce the concept of event context, and present constructs for using it to constrain event matching.The constructs have been implemented as an extension to an existing event monitoring system called Yeast, which serves as the event monitoring component in Provence.Provence is an open process-centered environment that monitors the actual execution of software processes, abstracted as sequences of low-level events, and maps these sequences of events into transitions in the process model enactment.

Rule-based software development environments (RBDEs) model the software development process in terms of rules that encapsulate development activities, and assist in executing the process via forward and backward chaining over the rule base. We investigate the scaling up of RBDEs to support (1) multiple views of the rule base for multiple users and (2) evolution of the rule base over the lifetime of a project. Our approach is based on clarifying two distinct functions of rules and chaining: maintaining consistency and automation. By definition, consistency is mandatory whereas automation is not. Distinguishing the consistency and automation aspects of RBDE assistance mechanisms makes it possible to formalize the range of compatible views and the scope of mechanizable evolution steps. Throughout the paper, we use the MARVEL RBDE as an example application.