Leveraging distributed software development

The Internet has been changing the way people collaborate on software development, offering certain advantages but also creating new requirements. Internet-based collaboration does make a wider base of talent available, but the development cycles running at Internet speeds require maintaining higher levels of precision. From a project-management perspective, communication is a key factor in Internet-based development. Internet-based collaboration requires effective team communication. The authors point out that when a development team isn't communicating well, it is nearly impossible to create and validate design solutions and manage the team's deliverables. So while Internet collaboration offers a number of advantages, the friction created by distributed-therefore delayed-communication typically increases the overhead associated with sharing project information. And the technology itself-including system interoperability and the synchronous or asynchronous collaboration tools-can create problems in a distributed development environment. As the complexities of distributed collaborative-development environments increase, frameworks designed for such environments will become essential. The authors describe one such framework-called SoftDock-and the new technologies it exploits. It lets developers analyze, design, and develop software from component models.