[development] Distributed Pairprogramming for Drupal

[Ken Winters]

I was thinking along the same lines.  Most of the Drupal development  
that I've seen is either:

A) Written by one person, then reviewed / improved asynchronously in  
the issue tracker rather than working at the same time
B) Written by a team of people for a project in-house, in which case  
it would be the same as basically any other in-house PHP development

I use Eclipse for all of my PHP development (and know some others who  
do as well), but I probably won't ever use something like Saros unless  
I got a tele-working position somewhere.

Some other module / core contributors might find it useful for those  
tasks, but it doesn't seem like a common need.

- Ken Winters

On Oct 14, 2009, at 12:08 PM, larry at garfieldtech.com wrote:

> Just one point to clarify, there is no "Drupal Team" that could  
> decide en masse to use a tool like this.  Drupal is so distributed  
> that we all have our own development workflows using a variety of  
> tools, often in our basements rather than our offices (although  
> there, too).  So "Could use and Drupal benefit" is really the wrong  
> question to ask.
>
> That said, I'm sure such a tool would prove useful to certain  
> developers if they choose to use it.
>
> Is it language-dependent?  Vis, most Eclipse devs work on Java, not  
> PHP, so I am always wary of tools that may end up being centric to  
> one particular language's development idiosyncrasies.
>
> --Larry Garfield
>
> Eike Starkmann wrote:
>> 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