The virtual teleworker-experimenting with a remote software engineering environment

As multi-company and multi-site software construction becomes more common we need to consider how a software engineering environment may be provided to workers at multiple locations. We report on an experiment that was undertaken as part of the ARISE project. Amongst other things, ARISE was concerned with the theme of distributed, collaborative engineering of software for broadband telecommunications, and this particular experiment investigates the feasibility, from a technological and cost point of view, of allowing a software engineer to work remotely. Central to all collaborative projects is a requirement for communication and sharing of project data. This is usually accomplished by the use of a central repository. For the purposes of these experiments, we created environments in which, although the central database was physically close, the interface to it was consistent with it being rather more remote, just as it would be for a real teleworker. Our teleworkers were not really teleworking, hence the term `virtual teleworker´