Fritz Thomas

Recently on the TYPO3-5 Mailing-List Eike Starkmann wrote about his master thesis project called Saros:

“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.”

He summarizes the advantages of using such a plugin:

“[Projects] … 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
• …

“

There is also a screencast avilable which demonstrates the features very well.