Sustainability for the development of the Saros distributed pair programming plugin

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Lutz Prechelt
• Subject Area: Software Engineering and Programming Languages
• Term: from 2018 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 390700540

Saros is an open-source plug-in for the Eclipse IDE that is being developed at Freie Universität Berlin since 2006. It provides the strongest support for distributed pair programming (DPP) available from any tool, open-source or commercial. Many industrial practitioners already use it for actual development work, which provides opportunities for researching the interesting DPP practice.Our goal is now to move Saros development from the university to a true open-source community in order to make it sustainable in the long term and ensure the research opportunities provided by Saros do not disappear, also for researchers outside our university. Furthermore, we want to make Saros available for the second important IDE, IntelliJ IDEA, as well, because many potential research partner companies will not use DPP if it is available on Eclipse only, thus restricting the breadth of DPP observation settings.

• DFG Programme: Research data and software (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)