An environment for synchronous software development

Collaboration is essential for the development of complex software systems. When a team of developers is geographically distributed, collaboration aspects -such as awareness, communication and synchronization- are compromised by physical distance. We present an approach, named synchronous development, to reduce the negative distance effects on collaboration. We use a fine-grained change tracking mechanism and instantaneously notify any developer working on the system about changes being performed by other developers. We believe that our approach can augment each developer's knowledge of the project and, consequently, promote interaction and increase productivity.