[development] Distributed Pairprogramming for Drupal

[Eike Starkmann]

Dear Drupal Team,

My name is Eike Starkmann and I'm working working as part of the Saros 
Team at the Freie University in Berlin.

Saros is an Eclipse plugin for collaborative text editing and 
distributed pair programming, i.e. it allows two or more developers to 
work together in real-time on the same files. It is similar to Gobby, 
SubEthaEdit or Google Docs but focuses on programming in Eclipse.

It is my master thesis to figure out whether Saros is useful when 
developing Free/Open Source Software. I already was in contact with  to 
other projects, for example Typo3 and got some good response.

In my opinion Drupal can benefit from Saros because I think it brings 
many advantages to Open Source Software development:

* Distributed Pair Programming is like a live peer review. This should 
help with finding good design, get rid of bugs, increase readability, etc.

* Transferring knowledge should be easier to do when more than one 
person look at and work with the same code. This should also help to 
give new developers an introduction to the code.

* In contrast to screen sharing, Saros only shares your actions inside 
of Eclipse with regards to the project you are both working on (think 
privacy) and you are still independent to explore the project on your own.

Saros can be useful in the following contexts:

* Working on complicated problems in the code
* Performing code reviews
* Debugging
* Code presentation
* Code sprints
* Introducing new developers to the project
* ...

What do you think? Could you and Drupal benefit from doing pair 
programming using Saros?

If you are interested in Saros but still curious about how it works 
please visit our website or feel free to contact me.

I hope you will find Saros useful and give me feedback.

Kind regards, Eike Starkmann

Website: https://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/w/SE/DPP
Update Site: http://dpp.sf.net/update
Saros @ SF: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dpp/
Programming Languages Supported by Saros : 
https://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/w/SE/DPPCompatiblePlugin


-- 
Eike Starkmann
This message is part of my Master thesis research. Feel free to contact
my advisors in case of inappropriate behavior on my side:
christopher.oezbek at fu-berlin.de and stephan.salinger at fu-berlin.de