Connecting Programming Environments to Support Ad-Hoc Collaboration

Physical proximity supports various forms of ad-hoc collaboration among developers such as opportunistic task adaptation and helping co-developers when they are stuck. Connecting the input/output flows of stand-alone programming environments of distributed developers offers the potential to support such collaboration among them. Such a connection has several components including communication sessions, awareness of others´ availability and the state of the objects on which they are working, and control channels allowing users to import edits of and share code with others and be notified when a team member has moved away from a program element of interest. It is possible to develop a collaboration-centered design that combines a variety of collaboration streams into a usable and useful user-interface, and implement the design using existing programming environment, communication, and compiler technologies.