Application Trends

Collaboration Tools Go the Distance

9/1/2005

By Alan R. Earls

Talking Points
RIGHT TOOLS IN THE RIGHT PLACES

Guy Shaviv, VP of engineering at Virtio, a vendor of software simulations for embedded devices, could be the poster child for software development managers who oversee teams dispersed around the globe. This software everyman is in a hot seat that’s hotter than most.

The company’s products are a critical element in the design and development of mobile phones and other products with embedded intelligence—a first step in a complex value chain on which hundreds of millions of dollars in sales can depend.

“Without the simulation ability that we provide, these products would take many more months to bring to market,” he says. And, by implication, if software isn’t ready and working when it is needed, the consequences can be calamitous.

Shaviv has managed to not only survive but also prosper by implementing basic management practices and by adopting tools from Rally Software Development designed to support collaborative, dispersed teams. Even with the best tools and techniques, managing a dispersed development team can be a challenge. However, the right tools and the right management techniques can make it only a little more difficult than managing a software development team under one roof.

Work here and there together
According to Gartner analyst Matt Light, distributed development teams have a history of using a very wide range of development tools for management, requirements modeling, app simulation, change and configuration, and version control. All those elements can have a role in any development process, but that role is magnified when teams are separated by time zones, language and cultural differences. Although Gartner has not done a formal market study, Light suspects the market for collaborative development products is less than $100 million in sales today, but could easily grow to $500 million within five years.

The one category that traditionally has been most important for bringing distributed development teams together is the software change and configuration management category, which includes version control tools, says Light. “If I’m working here, and you are working over there, and I make changes, you need to know which version we are at, and if either of us makes changes and it disrupts the system, we need to be able to go back out to the original version,” he explains. Software change tools take on an extra importance in distributed development.

Then there are development zones—Web-based tools that typically have some change management capability as one of their central features but also increasingly support other aspects of collaboration. “At Gartner, we call those collaborative arrangements ‘development zones,’ ” he says. Development zones may not include the software change management capability but do have other useful things for solving defects as well as for process management, whereby a formally defined process is implemented across the distributed team. “You have roles and responsibility and procedures clearly defined and collaborative development zones can help control that,” says Light. “It can even help manage assets like components.”