Abstract
Real-time collaborative programming is an emerging approach that supports a team of programmers to view and edit shared source code at the same time. Each programmer can edit any part of the source code, and changes become instantly visible at other collaborating sites. With a broad range of application scenarios and benefits, real-time collaborative programming has attracted increasing interest from academia and industry. Lightweight integrated development environments (lightweight IDEs) have rapidly grown in popularity in the recent years, but there are serious problems and limitations with existing real-time collaboration support for lightweight IDEs. In this study, we contribute a novel real-time collaborative programming environment named CoVSCode that supports unconstrained and flexible real-time collaboration based on Visual Studio Code, one of the most popular and widely used lightweight IDEs. We present design objectives and rationales, the workflow and functional design from collaborating programmers’ perspectives, major technical issues and solutions, and prototype implementation, as well as a set of experimental evaluations that have demonstrated the technical feasibility and good performance of the prototype system. All approaches, techniques and solutions derived in this work are generic, which can also be applied in building real-time collaborative programming environments for other lightweight IDEs.
Highlights
Software development requires effective collaboration among programmers with diverse skills and experiences
During a real-time collaboration session, each programmer can edit any part of the source code, and changes become instantly visible at other collaborating sites
During a real-time collaboration session, the proposed environment should ensure high local responsiveness at all sites, in the sense that each local editing operation performed on the source code must immediately take effect without noticeable delay
Summary
Software development requires effective collaboration among programmers with diverse skills and experiences. Non-real-time collaborative programming is a traditional approach that has been widely adopted and practiced in the communities for a long time, which is commonly supported by version control systems such as Git [2]. It is considered to be a kind of non-real-time collaboration because each programmer’s modification on the source code copy will be kept private until the updated source code is uploaded to the repository and merged into other programmers’. Real-time collaborative programming is an emerging approach that supports a team of programmers to view and edit a set of shared source code documents at the same time [3]. During a real-time collaboration session, each programmer can edit any part of the source code, and changes become instantly visible at other collaborating sites.
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