Infrastructure for wlde-area software development

Abstract

The Global Research And Development environmENT (GRADLENT) is a research project, addressing globalization of software P~zD. The first effort is to design and implement an infrastructure for wide-area software development. With such an infrastructure~ programmers, located on geographically dispersed sites, are able to share source files as if they were in the same location. The system extends the scope of versioning control, found in Configuration Management, from a single site to multiple sites. It allows individual programmers to construct private working areas. Finally, the infrastructure preserves the file system API and requires no modification of commands or the kernel. A prototype running between New Jersey and Taiwan is currently used as a framework for research in configuration management of wide-area software development. This paper reports our experience in designing and implementing the infrastructure.