Section 2.4. Collaborative Development

2.4. Collaborative Development

You have a developer in Tokyo, a team in Bangalore, a team in Zurich, and a shop in Seattle, all working on the same codebase. How can you possibly keep the development train from coming off the rails? Communication!

2.4.1. IRC/IM/Email

One might imagine that only now, with the advent of IM and VoIP, can developers keep up with each other. In fact, developers have stayed in touch in something approximating real time since the early days of Unix, when they began to have a great variety of communications tools to use.^[7] Early on, two developers on the same machine used the Write or Talk Unix programs, which allowed for a simple exchange of text between users. This grew into Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and then Instant Messenger (IM).

^[7] In fact, the Unix "write" command allowed hackers in the 1970s to communicate in a fashion not so different from IM.

Email itself plays the most important role in development. It is the base packet of persistent knowledge that distributed developer teams have. Wikis are also taking hold as repositories of information.

2.4.2. VoIP

Strangely (to nondevelopers) voice simply hasn't caught on as a terrific tool for ongoing developer communications. While a regular conference call is useful for keeping everyone moving in the same direction, the idea of vocal input while developing would drive many coders away screaming. The phone isn't evil, but maintaining an uninterruptible flow can be very important to developer productivity. Phones also do not create a logfile or other transcript that can be referred to later. Don't take my experiences for gospel here. Read the book Peopleware^[8] for more information about this. Everywhere I've ever worked, the one constant has been developers wearing headphones, but listening to music, not other developers yammering in their ears.

^[8] Tom Demarco and Timothy Lister, Peopleware (New York, NY: Dorset House Publishing Company, 1999).

2.4.3. SourceForge

The online site SourceForge.net is the largest concentration of open source projects and code on the planet. SourceForge boasts some 100,000 projects and 1 million registered developers, and people use its integrated version control, project web hosting, file release mechanism, bug control, and mailing lists to write a vast amount of software. Pulling together these features on a free platform for open source developers proved to be a revolutionary concept. Before, people were left implementing this themselves with Bugzilla (a bug-tracking mechanism) and CVS or some other version control/bug-tracking facilities.

SourceForge represents, for a lot of people, the next stage in developer environments. VA Software, the company that runs SourceForge through its Open Source Technology Group (OSTG) subsidiary, sells this sort of solution into the enterprise, as does the Brisbane, California-based Collab.net.