Real-time collaborative coding in a web IDE

Abstract

This paper describes Collabode, a web-based Java integrated development environment designed to support close, synchronous collaboration between programmers. We examine the problem of collaborative coding in the face of program compilation errors introduced by other users which make collaboration more difficult, and describe an algorithm for errormediated integration of program code. Concurrent editors see the text of changes made by collaborators, but the errors reported in their view are based only on their own changes. Editors may run the program at any time, using only errorfree edits supplied so far, and ignoring incomplete or otherwise error-generating changes. We evaluate this algorithm and interface on recorded data from previous pilot experiments with Collabode, and via a user study with student and professional programmers. We conclude that it offers appreciable benefits over naive continuous synchronization without regard to errors and over manual version control.

A survey of the use of crowdsourcing in software engineering

“…2) Crowd programming environment: Instead of adopting crowd knowledge over the Internet to help conventional coding activities, some other studies have focused on providing systems to support crowd-based coding work [28], [144]- [148], [152], [153], [217].…”

A Vision of Crowd Development

“…In Stack Overflow, developers ask questions, other developers answer them, and yet other developers evaluate the quality of the answers, concurrently curating a knowledge repository of frequent questions [21]. In Collabode, an original programmer requests short programming microtasks which are completed by workers using a shared web IDE [10,11]. CrowdCode enables crowds of developers to write code, test, debug, and respond to changes through microtasks [18].…”

Automatic enforcement of constraints in real-time collaborative architectural decision making

“…For example, numerous real-time collaborative Web-based Integrated Development Environments, such as Cloud9, 1 Koding, 2 Adinda (van Deursen et al, 2010) or Collabode (Goldman et al, 2011) have been proposed. In addition, real-time collaborative Web-based modeling tools, such as Creatly 3 or Lucidchart, 4 have also been proposed.…”