Readings - Week 6

Building Collaboration into IDE's

What are the major collaborative features suggested by the authors?

Collaboration within the development environment is becoming increasingly sought after by technical team-members, allowing them to be aware of what is going on at all times and who is responsible for changes, additions or in general work throughout the lifetime of software program development. Some of the major examples used are:

1. Configuration Management - Integration reduces friction in the software development process
2. Screen Sharing - Integration promotes context in which the collaboration was done
3. Email and IM - Integration strives for traceability, allowing the content to be referenced and searched later

When looking at some of the features necessary in a collaborative IDE, one has to be careful at defining these, since many groups that work within the project adhere to different guidelines, program differently, and even use different tools for a wide variety of tasks. It is therefore imperative that the features be a global representation of what the collaborative process needs, and not what each member "wants" to have. Some of these features include:

• Provide peripheral awareness of other programmers and their activities (who is doing what around our code, especially code that you depend on).
• Support a variety of communication mechanisms (text, voice, visual).
• Integrate with the team's source-code control system and bug tracking system.
• Support "in context" communication, both synchronous (chat, screen sharing) and asynchronous (code annotations, persistent chats, team documentation).
• Support searching through saved team artifacts and the development history.