Collaborative Software Development on the Web

TL;DR

This paper introduces CloudStudio, a cloud-based IDE designed to enhance collaborative and distributed software development by enabling real-time editing and conflict management, thus overcoming limitations of traditional IDEs.

Contribution

It proposes a new paradigm of cloud-based development and presents CloudStudio, an IDE that facilitates real-time collaboration and simplifies configuration management for distributed teams.

Findings

CloudStudio improves usability for collaborative development.

Real-time conflict tracking reduces integration issues.

Case study shows advantages over traditional IDEs.

Abstract

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.