An environment for synchronous software development

Collaboration is essential for the development of complex software systems. When a team of developers is geographically distributed, collaboration aspects -such as awareness, communication and synchronization- are compromised by physical distance. We present an approach, named synchronous development, to reduce the negative distance effects on collaboration. We use a fine-grained change tracking mechanism and instantaneously notify any developer working on the system about changes being performed by other developers. We believe that our approach can augment each developer´s knowledge of the project and, consequently, promote interaction and increase productivity.