Syde: a tool for collaborative software development

Team collaboration is essential for the success of multi-developer projects. When team members are spread across different locations, individual awareness of the activity of others drops due to communication barriers. We built Syde, a tool infrastructure to reestablish team awareness by sharing change and conflict information across developer's workspaces. Our main challenge is to balance the tradeoff between offering relevant information about the activity of the team and avoiding information overload. The novelty of our approach is that we model source code changes as first-class entities to record the detailed evolution of a multi-developer project. Hence, Syde delivers precise change information to interested developers.