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The Importance of Collaborative Development

Posted by Hemos on from the working-together-for-bettering-us-all dept.

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.

2 of 61 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Am I the only one... by WeeBull · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I agree with your sentiments, but in my experience there's at least one more scenario where pair programming is benefitial - where neither coder A or coder B have any experience with the codebase in question. In cases like that, I've found it incredibly valuable to have someone to talk to and bounce ideas and suggestions off of while trying to figure out exactly what (nevermind how? or why?) a particular piece of code or sub-system does.

    Oh - and you're way off topic, btw. RTFA =)

  2. Document Creation Tools Need To Be Fixed by theManInTheYellowHat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.