Shared and transparent access to team source code

SNiFF+ requires you to specify the root directory under which your team's shared source code is located. The files and directories under this root directory access your team's Repository. At regular intervals, all these files and directories need to be updated to reflect the most current state of your team's software system. How this updating occurs is discussed later on.
When creating software systems from scratch, your team's first job is to populate this root directory with source code. For existing software systems, your team will already have such a central location. In either case, once you have such a root directory, you have to tell SNiFF+ where it is. You do this by defining a Shared Source Working Environment (SSWE).
All team members see, or share, the latest version of your software system as reflected by the source files in the SSWE. When browsing the source files, this view is read-only. When editing source files, team members work on local copies of the shared source files they want to modify--they never directly modify the shared source files in the SSWE. The view to all other source files (those not being modified) remains read-only.
SNiFF+ also supports more complicated models of source code storage. You might, for example, have multiple locations containing shared source code, with different team members making modifications to the different shared source pools. A central location might "pool together" the most current versions of the source code from the different shared source pools. In this case, you can define multiple SSWEs. We'll discuss different strategies for using SSWEs later on.