A loosely organized, ad-hoc community of contributors from all over the world who share an interest in meeting a common need, ranging from minor projects to huge developments, which they carry out using a high-performance collaborative development environment, allowing the organizational scheme and processes to emerge over time. The concept represents one of the most successful examples of high-performance collaboration and community-building on the Internet.
Published in Chapter:
Collaborative Development Environments
Javier Soriano (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), Spain), Genoveva López (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), Spain), and Rafael Fernández (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), Spain)
Copyright: © 2008
|Pages: 7
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-885-7.ch030
Abstract
More and more often organizations tend to behave like dynamically reconfigurable networked structures that carry out their tasks by means of collaboration and teamwork. Effective teamwork is an essential part of any non-trivial engineering process, and collaborative capabilities are an essential support for these teams. Software development is no exception; it is in itself a collaborative team effort, which has its own peculiarities. Both in the context of open source software development projects and in organizations that develop corporate products, more and more developers need to communicate and liaise with colleagues in geographically distant areas about the software product that they are conceiving, designing, building, testing, debugging, deploying, and maintaining. In their work, these development teams face significant collaborative challenges motivated by barriers erected by geographic distances, time factors, number of participants, business units or differences in organizational hierarchy or culture that inhibit and constrain the natural flow of communication and collaboration. To successfully overcome these barriers, these teams need tools by means of which to communicate with each other and coordinate their work. These tools should also take into account the functional, organizational, temporal and spatial characteristics of this collaboration. Software product users are now becoming increasingly involved in this process, for which reason they should also be considered.