[development] Distributed Pairprogramming for Drupal

[Eike Starkmann]

Ken Winters wrote:
> 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
> 
If you are working just like this perhaps Saros really doesn't make
sense. But what is about the issue Cameron was thinking of? Working
together with Saros and getting the patches in the core?
> 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.
> 
Would be great if there are some people, how would like to find this out.

Greets, Eike
> 
> 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
> 


-- 
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