Brought to you by: Jason Corso, Anya Kanevsky, Jeremy Mullendore, Lewis Raszewski.
Overview Of Project Design
Current software engineering trends indicate that most large-scale software development projects are required by design or circumstance to operate in a distributed mode for at least a portion of their development process. In order to prevent the physical location of team members from restricting team progress, it would be optimal to allow for a team to perform the same tasks, whether the individial members are located in the same office or halfway around the world. Our goal is to develop a set of tools which are beneficial to development teams regardless of proximity of the team members to each other.
Our application is centered around the concept of a distributed development team (DDT). We propose to create a workspace environment, which is oriented toward the needs of such a team. While some components of our system are similar to existing applications, we know of no working environment that explicitly targets a distributed development team.
include:
- A Distributed Whiteboard
- Chat/Messaging Clients
- File Sharing
- Progress Meetings
- Code Walkthroughs
- Post-Its (Annotations)
- Group Calendar
- Persistence of Meeting Transcripts
In addition, the proposed system is not limited to software development teams; the basic system could be easily adapted to suit the needs of other distributed workgroup environments, such as an advertising agency team (composed of writers, graphic artists, managers, consultants, etc.), or any other group of people working on interrelated tasks. Although the current design targets groups of small to moderate size, the system does not impose any limitation on the number of users beyond those of practicality resulting from technological issues such as network bandwidth.
The utility of this system is demonstrated by the fact that as of the writing of this document, the members of the development team felt their progress hindered by lack of such a tool that could be used in the design of the system.
In order to help us (and you) understand how we are going to go about creating such an application, we have included some diagrams here .