Collaborative development environments (a follow up)

After my entry the other day, Distributed Teams in Development, I did some extra poking around for papers written on the subject. Luckily, the software development world is chock full of these smart people who are willing to make their thoughts and work available to us all out of the goodness of their hearts. Grady Booch's Papers section has a wealth of great information on tough topics. Better still, it's accessible to us mere mortals in that it's not self referential in ideas or terminology. I'm looking at you J2EE.

One paper of interest, titled Papers on collaborative development environments (CDEs) (doc, pdf) relates to what I discussed the other day and breaks it down much better than I ever could. This is worth a read if you work in an environment that is, as he describes distributed by time and distance. There's references to products, both open source and commercial, that are interesting as well. In some cases, he offers a unique view on how to use these products together.

Either way, it's a good bit of insight into a difficult problem.