Developer Collaboration Reality Check

Question

Distributed Teams = Fact

Collaboration Infrastructure = SVN/CVS/HG + Ticket/Req-System + Wiki + Forum + Mailing List + xyz

This collaboration is more or less offline, the individual developers can work independent of time and location.

But how you collaborate in real-time on a code level, eg. code review ? I asked recently for a specific tool embedded in Netbeans (Netbeans 6.5.1 + Openfire 3.6.4 Collaboration ?), but didnt get any answer. So I ask more general ? What are you using ? I am not talking about screen sharing, aka Skype-Plugin, VNC, Teamviewer, Yuuguu, etc, (which is ok for demo'ing) but about a tool that is embedded on a sourcecode level. Me and my peer can type in one shared piece of code, with different background color for distinction (while talking over Skype).

What is your view, experience, recommendation or choice of tool ?

Cheers

Answer 1

Because new programming methodologies tend to be oriented toward, and thus implemented by, new technologies (new platforms for application development), I love the new Mozilla Labs endeavor, called Bespin. It is still very early for use by a development team, however, its by far my favorite (the best?) in the collaborative IDE space.

https://bespin.mozilla.com/

Answer 2

Have you looked into Gobby? It is a cross platform collaborative text editor which supports syntax highlighting in which one of the clients can act as the host (if I remember rightly). It sounds like the sort of tool that you are after.

Answer 3

I tried out a trial of Code Collaborator, it seemed really awesome.

I loved that it integrated with your SCM, showed you comments from other developers embedded within the source code (so you can see what lines a comment applies to), forced everyone involved in a review to read all the comments, supported a "chat" back and forth feature within a specific code review, etc. Very neat looking tool.

Answer 4

Another product that we use at my company is "rietveld".

Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python, while working at Google creating a code review tool called Mondrian. Sense Mondrian's release, he has made another suite called "Rietveld".

Rietveld is a Django project that you can deploy on the Google App Engine. This presents significant benefit to a serious development team: stable deployment platform, for free, no limitations on licenses, open source, written by a really, really good developer.

A full explanation of Rietveld can be found at http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/rietveld.html

What's great about this web-based asynchronous method of code review is that it allows distributed teams not working in the same time frame to continue executing in the same style to quickly adopt code review and still adjust to the necessary and inevitable shift that it will bring to that team.