Collaboration should become a first-class citizen in support environments for software engineers

Abstract

Much work has been done in developing Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) for supporting software engineers in their isolated programming tasks. Software Engineering however, is primarily a collaborative activity in which communication, coordination and cooperation with colleagues is essential. Supporting this collaboration is often overlooked in support environments while it is in fact highly beneficial for Software Engineering teams in general and distributed teams in particular. Progress has been made in extending existing IDEs with functionality for supporting the collaborative activities in Software Engineering, however such environments are focused primarily on the programming task with collaboration functionality added to that. In this paper we argue the case that collaboration should be at the core of Integrated Collaborative Development Environments by showing exhibits that Software Engineering is primarily a collaborative activity, discussing limitations in the support for this in existing solutions and discussing our own approach in dealing with these limitations.