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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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])