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Organizations who have transitioned their development environments to the Cloud have started realizing benefits such as: cost reduction in hardware; relatively accelerated development process via reduction of time and effort to set up development and testing environments; unified management; service and functionality expansion; on-demand provisioning and access to resources and development environments. These benefits represent only a fraction of the full potential that could be achieved via leveraging Cloud Computing for the collaborative software development process. Related efforts in this area have been mainly in the areas of: asynchronous collaboration; collaboration in isolated aspects of the Software Development process, such as coding activities; use of open-source tools for contributing, improving, and managing code, etcetera. Although these efforts represent valid contributions and important enablers, they are still missing important aspects which enable a more holistic process, with solid theoretical foundation. This paper reviews this research area, in order to better assess factors and gaps creating the need to enhance the collaborative software development process in the Cloud, to better meet the pressure to collaboratively create better cloud-agnostic applications.

Software development is an activity involving a remix set of different people, tools, practice culture, etcetera, and working towards an end goal. Achieving the goal necessitates that all these aspects work together towards the end goal. Furthermore, the size, complexity, longevity and tight delivery timelines of software projects, form part of the rationale for collaboration in software development processes. With the advent of Cloud computing, these factors have become more pronounced. Other factors such as increased distribution, have also become part of the rationale increasing the need for better collaborative approaches. Collaboration can take numerous forms and dimensions, but that does not necessarily mean that any form of collaborative approach is good for every scenario or context. There is no "one size fits all" approach. Different development contexts may require different collaborative approaches for greater effectiveness. So, which collaborative approach is right, and which is wrong, for Cloud-based software development lifecycle? This paper reviews literature with an aim of presenting a classification for collaborative approaches towards context-aware Cloud-based software development.