Continuous coordination: a new paradigm for collaborative software engineering tools

Abstract

Collaborative software engineering tools that have been developed and used to date exhibit a fundamental paradox: they are meant to support the collaborative activity of software development, but cause individuals and groups to work independently from one another. The underlying issue is that existing tools discretize time and tasks in concrete but isolated process steps. This approach is fundamentally flawed in assuming that human activity can be codified and that periodic resynchronization of tasks is an easy step. We propose a new approach to supporting collaborative work called continuous coordination. The underlying principle is that humans must not and cannot have their method of collaboration dictated, but should be supported flexibly with both the tools and the information to coordinate themselves and collaborate in their activities as they see fit. In this paper, we define the concept of continuous collaboration, introduce our work to date in building some example tools that support the continuous coordination paradigm, and set out a further research agenda to be pursued