Traditional software inspection requires participants to meet together at the same time in the same place.Distributed, asynchronous inspection allows participants to conduct meetings independently of time and space, making inspection more convenient.We report on an industrial study that we have performed using a tool designed for distributed, asynchronous software inspection.Our e>..-perience suggests that distributed, asynchronous software inspection is feasible, and is a costeffective means of collaboration for geographically distributed work groups.

Many software engineering tasks have a synchronous component that requires the participants to assemble together at the same time and place. This approach is expensive in terms of traveling, scheduling and human resources. Existing computer tools mitigate these constraints by adding structure to the meeting, providing on-line document support, and distributing the participants over geographic boundaries. The constraint remains, however, that all participants participate at the same timeWe propose relaxing the time constraint in software engineering tasks to resolve issues non-concurrently, in effect reducing (and in some cases eliminating) the need for the synchronous meeting. We hypothesize that support for asynchrony will enable software engineering teams to work together as effectively in different times as in same time.We have chosen software inspection as our candidate software engineering task because it is well-understood, highly-structured, and widely-practiced. We have designed and developed a Collaborative Asynchronous Inspection of Software (CAIS) meeting prototype that supports the meeting part of inspection. CAIS allows participants to effectively "meet" even when separated by time zones and working schedules. We have conducted a pilot study comparing the manual and CAIS meetings and present our results and lessons learned.

SuiteSound, a programming environment with integrated support for multimedia, is discussed. SuiteSound is built in the Suite object-based system on a conventional UNIX operating system. SuiteSound objects incorporate multimedia by creating flows and filters. Flows are streams of multimedia data moving through a sequence of objects. They bridge the gap between objects representing the state of an entity at a discrete point in time and space and continuous media such as live audio or video. Filters are intermediate objects between the source and destination of a flow. They take flow as input, perform one of several operations such as multiplex-in, multiplex-out, gain control, or silence deletion on it, and send the resulting flow to its destination. In effect, they provide a virtual device interface for the application programmer that is uniform and independent of any physical device. The design and implementation of SuiteSound on the Sun SparcStation are described. Experiments performed to determine the network and CPU load of the sound tool are reviewed.>