Ronda: A fine grained collaborative development environment

Abstract

Programmers seldom work in isolation: Software development is a social human activity, which therefore requires collaboration among the involved programmers. We argue that the main vehicles for programming-the integrated development environments (IDEs)-were designed without collaboration in mind. IDEs focus on a single viewpoint of the system, hence team members are aware of system changes only after the code is committed to the versioning system, which delays discussions that would otherwise prevent conflicts. We propose a novel IDE, named Ronda, devised from the ground up, to fully embrace the collaborative nature of programming. Such an IDE allows a team of developers to take part in development sessions, both individually and in a group, within the same environment, promoting awareness and coordination, by tracking, broadcasting and visualizing fine-grained changes to the system. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.