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The Importance of Collaborative Development
Eugene Eric Kim writes: "A few months ago, I wrote an essay entitled, "A Manifesto for
Collaborative Tools," outlining a vision for how we can and should be
making collaborative tools more interoperable. The article was
published in the May issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal and is now available
on the web." This manifesto is a good one, particularly if you aren't as a familiar with Doug Engelbart as you should be. There's also some interesting links to learn more about the Semantic Web, and social networks, well worth checking out as well.
"While I wholeheartedly agree with having lots of meetings and discussions during the design phase (requirements, functional spec, detailed design) and during the review phase (post mortem, code reviews) I feel that having two coders on one computer is extremely wasteful and unbelievably stressful."
Did I miss in the article where they said 2 coders on the same computer??? When they talk about colaboration they don't say 2 conders on a computer or people looking over your shoulder.
Evolution or ID?
This is one of the most important things in creating any product. I have seen in software and engineering, programs and products created that were technically really cool but didn't fulfil what the "people" wanted.
Creating applications that are people-centric are key. They can make or break a product. I use an app that has a few bigt bugs but it was designed to be people-centric so I still love it. It was coded horribly, has crashed for some dumb reasons but how it was designed is great. (A note, I am working with the author to iron out those bugs)
Evolution or ID?
Oh - and you're way off topic, btw. RTFA =)
What I don't get is why the open source groupware projects aren't integrating wikis. It has been solidly proven that wikis can be powerful in certain situations. And, in a collaborative environment, there is virtually no alternative solution for what a wiki provides.
Also, if a good groupware system integrated an editor into the client and supported a slightly more extensive set of tags, this could result in easy to edit, good-looking documents made collaboratively.
Why are so many open source projects so densely certain that they must imitate proprietary crap?
But that's the whole point--Now it's simple. When I'm doing something that needs a relational database, I don't have to re-invent one. There might be fiddly details with plumbing and which one to use, but during design, I can draw a relational database box on the whiteboard without worrying too much about what's inside it. If I want to connect a bunch of tables, select what I want, sort them a particular way, it's there.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
The average user needs to be able to create the docs and the tools need to do the colaboration. It has to happen way before the the save-as menu option. It also needs to happen with out the users even knowing it is happening.
I also think that the whole "document as a file" scheme needs to go away. The printed copy needs to have watermarked inside it the version and date it was created / printed. But the document is an ever changing entity that should be accessable and modified but not saved as a file. As soon as someone has a portable, editable file, the whole system is broken. Just like the floppy breaks the network.
CVS et al. needs to be done at some level so that the user never even knows it is happening. I believe that the whole co-laboration methods that we have currently are great for programers and techies but the average user is still shaking their heads in confusion. Just like what the average user is thinking about public key encryption.
I am sure "collaborative software" as a topic has been discussed much on /. but is there a good way to get to these related forums for people who just visited this one?
This would be an enhancement along the spirit of the article being discussed.
(Score:0, Troll)
Im going to have to agree... this article seemed like yet another big fluffy acedemic rant about what's wrong with computer software these days, without giving ANY practical new ideas.
I mean, look at his roadmap at the end: Be people-centric? Collaborate? Use standards? Keep improving? Is that supposed to be profound? I doubt its even correct!
Its neither necessary nor sufficient for developers to do any of the above and make great software. Is 'C' people-centric? How much GREAT software was written by one or two people? How many open standards are poorly written and SHOULD be ignored? If we all listened to this guy, the web would NEVER have gotten off the ground - we be stuck in collaboration meetings in VRML-land, discussing how to improve our people-centricness.
I started out interested in the article... thinking I'd get something along the lines of 'what would Engelbart do?' But no... it just turned out to be yet another Johnny-Come-Lately praising Blogs, Wikis, and Google, and without anything original to add. Yet another ivory tower HACK trying to justify his mongo paycheck.
I KNOW this one will get moderated as a TROLL, but I dont care. These kinds of people really cheese me off...