Palantir: Coordinating distributed workspaces

Distributed software development suffers from limited collaboration capabilities, as developers are unable to easily coordinate their efforts across physical boundaries. Different fields, such as CSCW and groupware, have attempted to bridge this gap, but few of the approaches developed so far have been incorporated in current software development environments. Configuration Management (CM) systems are vital to any software development process, support distributed development, and are in widespread use. Unfortunately, they have only limited support for distributed collaboration. In this paper we describe Palantir, a system that is aimed at bringing collaborative capabilities to distributed development. Palantir builds upon existing CM systems to introduce project awareness to the developer workspace. In particular, Palantir supports close collaboration among developers by visualizing concurrent changes and showing, in real time, the severity and impact of those changes on the developer's workspace.