Elements for a cloud-based development environment

Abstract

In almost any other field than software development, the World Wide Web, or simply the Web has revolutionized collaboration by providing a platform for cooperative applications and services. In contrast, so far revision control, also referred to as version management, has been the key technology for enabling collaborative software development. However, even today it is feasible to build a cooperative development environment that runs in a cloud, following the spirit of Google Docs, where developers can cooperate in real time. In this paper, we take a step beyond from the design of the technical artifact that allows collaborative coding, and consider the consequences of such an approach to software development in a more general sense, in particular from the perspective of version management. The goal is to integrate collaborative development with traditional facilities commonly associated with software engineering. This in turn will lead to a development approach where new opportunities complement tools that are known to work and provide a lot of added value in software development.