The Challenges of Remote Collaboration by Mark Murphy, O'Reilly ONLamp.com, 06/12/2003, defines Collaborative Development as the development of software over a physical, organization, or cultural distance. Remote teams may be created from separate parts of a large organization with multiple locations, the use of offshore development contractors, or a partnership situation with another organization, in addition to the loosely defined teams who participate in open source software development efforts.

Challenges center around the goal of maintaining quality and productivity. Operational issues include maintaining organized access to data such as requirements and source code libraries. Social issues, as always, boil down to trust between the distant groups. Taking the lessons learned via open source efforts, the author provides a few tips to developers to make their distributed project run more smoothly.

• Foster tight communications via asynchronous formats like mailing lists.
• Provide an internet-accessible CM system for both source code and documents, provide some form of automated issue tracking. This can be used for anything from bug tracking to enhancement requests to task assignments, and also forms a knowledge base so repeat problems can be handled efficiently.
• Assess security needs and provide appropriate protection in the form of user signons, roles-based and project-based authorization, and encryption or work products and communication channels.
• Establish a collaboration environment which provides flexibility and room for growth. For example, an issues tracker should be set up on a per-project basis.

Tools of interest include:

• CollabNet SourceCast
• SourceForge
• GForge
• look for more on the Tools Guide for collaborative products and services

3:44:34 PM    
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