Collaborative and social development environments: a literature review

Software developers spend a majority of their time using a development environment coupled with a variety of collaborative tools. They use integrated development environments (IDEs) in different editing and debugging activities while solving particular technical problems or developing different pieces of software. These programming environments evolved from commandline tools, to text-based IDEs, graphical IDEs, and eventually to collaborative and social development environments (SDEs). This paper reviews the current state of the art in collaborative development environments (CDEs) and surveys the evolution in this area. The importance of collaboration within software engineering is addressed, followed by detailed information about collaborative systems for software development.Groupware architectures, taxonomies, andgroupware applications relevant to software development are discussed, and various research systems that fall within these classifications are described. The paper concludes with recent research related to collaborative and social software engineering.