3D-IDE - Integrated Development Environment

A software engineer spends about 70 percent of his or her time on cooperative activities.^[1] Therefore, collaboration is essential for software development. With the progress of globalization, a growing number of software development projects are temporarily and geographically distributed, which increases the difficulty of collaboration, since increasing distance between team members usually leads to less effective teams.

Currently, software developing teams tend to use an Interactive Development Environment (IDE) to develop software, while collaborating with each other through existing configuration management systems, issue tracking databases, and communication tools such as email and Instant Messaging (IM). This incurs the cost of context switching between tools inside and outside of the IDE, which may not satisfy the increasing requirement on collaboration. To reduce the cost and satisfy the increasing collaboration requirement, the collaborative components need to be embedded in the IDE itself, under which, they can communicate and collaborate with each other, without leaving the IDE they usually use.

Furthermore, in the current state of software development practices, to know the other team members' status a team member usually has to communicate with them directly, which needs to interrupt them, or check the project artifacts, which may take times, and does not get the real time information. To improve the efficiency of collaboration among the team, a passive and real-time team awareness is needed.

To meet the increasing collaboration needs in the global and large-scale software development, we propose to build a 3D Integrated Development Environment (3D-IDE) which will act as a Collaborative Development Environment (CDE) in a virtual world. We choose Eclipse as the IDE, and Second Life as the virtual world. We choose Eclipse because it is a widely-used open-source IDE with platform-independent extensible plug-in architecture. We choose Second Life because it is one of the most popular virtual worlds with open-source client (they also plan to open source server in the future), various communication and collaboration approaches, powerful 3-D creation tools and the Linden Scripting Language.

1. Iris Vessey and Ajay Paul Sravanapudi. CASE tools as collaborative support technologies. Communications of the ACM, 38(1):83-95, 1995.