An Evaluation Model for Social Development Environments

Abstract

Distributed software development is becoming a common practice among developers. Factors such as the development environments improvement, their extensibility, and the emergence of social networking software are leading factors. They lead the development process (both co-located and geographically distributed) to a practice that: 1) improves the team’s productivity, and 2) encourages and supports the social interaction among the teams’ members. The above factors along with the distributed development emergence, Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) evolution, and the social media advances got the attention of the software development teams, and made them consider how to better assist the social nature of software developers, and the social aspects of software development, including activity awareness of team members’ progress, their presence, collaboration, communication, and coordination around shared artifacts. IDEs are the most commonly used tools by developers and programmers. Integrating the most needed development tools inside the IDE, makes it a Collaborative Development Environment (CDE), and embedding a variety of social software features within a CDE helps support distributed development teams. It also creates a new genera of tools called Social Development Environments or “SDEs” as it is commonly called. This article discusses the origins and development of “SDEs”. It reflects and presents the research into development environments, explaining their role in supporting the communication and coordination needs of development teams. Also, it presents the effect of embedding social network features in such environments. It presents some emerging SDEs and future work. Finally, it concludes by introducing a new model named 5-star that classifies, and helps to evaluate and compare the collaborative tools. 5-star presents a new way to compare and evaluate the SDE systems based on their supported features. It bases the comparison on five major categories including: Communication, Coordination, Collaboration, Awareness & Presence, and Social networking (SN) tools.