Software development environments (IDEs) have not followed the IT industry's inexorable trend towards distribution. They do too little to address the problems raised by today's increasingly distributed projects; neither do they facilitate collaborative and interactive development practices. A consequence is the continued reliance of today's IDEs on paradigms such as traditional configuration management, which were developed for earlier modes of operation and hamper collaborative projects. This contribution describes a new paradigm: cloud-based development, which caters to the specific needs of distributed and collaborative projects. The CloudStudio IDE embodies this paradigm by enabling developers to work on a shared project repository. Configuration management becomes unobtrusive; it replaces the explicit update-modify-commit cycle by interactive editing and real-time conflict tracking and management. A case study involving three teams of pairs demonstrates the usability of CloudStudio and its advantages for collaborative software development over traditional configuration management practices.
Some research prototypes of web IDEs have experimented novel approaches to collaborative development. Besides CloudStudio, the project Collabode @cite_0 supports real-time code sharing among developers through a web IDE. Unlike CloudStudio, however, Collabode does not introduce new notions of CM, and it is mainly intended for developers simultaneoutly working on the same piece of code with the same view (similarly to CloudStudio's interweave mode).
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2184500637 2143602702 2120089691 2051074879
This thesis presents Collabode, a web-based integrated development environment for Java. With real-time collaborative editing, multiple programmers can use Collabode to edit the same source code at the same time. Collabode introduces error-mediated integration , where multiple editors see the text of one another's changes while being isolated from errors and in-progress work, and error-free changes are integrated automatically. Three models of collaborative programming are presented and evaluated using Collabode. Classroom programming brings zero-setup web-based programming to computer science students working in a classroom or lab. Test-driven pair programming combines two existing software development strategies to create a model with clear roles and explicit tool support. And micro-outsourcing enables one programmer to easily request and integrate very small contributions from many distributed assistants, demonstrating how a system for highly-collaborative programming enables a development model infeasible with current tools. To show that highly-collaborative programming, using real-time collaborative editing of source code, is practical, useful, and enables new models of software development, this thesis presents a series of user studies. A study with pairs of both student and professional programmers shows that error-mediated integration allows them to work productively in parallel. In a semester-long deployment of Collabode, students in an MIT software engineering course used the system for classroom programming. In a lab study of a Collabode prototype, professional programmers used test-driven pair programming. Finally, a study involving both in-lab participants and contractors hired online demonstrated how micro-outsourcing allowed participants to approach programming in a new way, one enabled by collaborative editing, automatic error-mediated integration, and a web-based environment requiring no local setup. (Copies available exclusively from MIT Libraries, libraries.mit.edu docs - [email protected]) This paper describes Collabode, a web-based Java integrated development environment designed to support close, synchronous collaboration between programmers. We examine the problem of collaborative coding in the face of program compilation errors introduced by other users which make collaboration more difficult, and describe an algorithm for error-mediated integration of program code. Concurrent editors see the text of changes made by collaborators, but the errors reported in their view are based only on their own changes. Editors may run the program at any time, using only error-free edits supplied so far, and ignoring incomplete or otherwise error-generating changes. We evaluate this algorithm and interface on recorded data from previous pilot experiments with Collabode, and via a user study with student and professional programmers. We conclude that it offers appreciable benefits over naive continuous synchronization without regard to errors and over manual version control. Collaborating programmers should use a development environment designed specifically for collaboration, not the same one designed for solo programmers with a few collaborative processes and tools tacked on. This paper describes Collabode, a web-based Java integrated development environment built to support close, synchronous collaboration between programmers. We discuss three collaboration models in which participants take on distinct roles: micro-outsourcing to combine small contributions from many assistants; test-driven pair programming for effective pairwise development; and a mobile instructor connected to the work of many students. In particular, we report very promising preliminary results using Collabode to support micro-outsourcing. When faced with the need for documentation, examples, bug fixes, error descriptions, code snippets, workarounds, templates, patterns, or advice, software developers frequently turn to their web browser. Web resources both organized and authoritative as well as informal and community-driven are heavily used by developers. The time and attention devoted to finding (or re-finding) and navigating these sites is significant. We present Codetrail, a system that demonstrates how the developer's use of web resources can be improved by connecting the Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE) and the Firefox web browser. Codetrail uses a communication channel and shared data model between these applications to implement a variety of integrative tools. By combining information previously available only to the IDE or the web browser alone (such as editing history, code contents, and recent browsing), Codetrail can automate previously manual tasks and enable new interactions that exploit the marriage of data and functionality from Firefox and Eclipse. Just as the IDE will change the contents of peripheral views to focus on the particular code or task with which the developer is engaged, so, too, the web browser can be focused on the developer's current context and task.