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Collaboration

Complex software requires an extraordinary collaborative effort among people who must be individually creative, yet still make what they do fit exactly with what others are doing.

The sheer size of the effort and the number of people working on the same project at the same time in the same place can get in the way of the group’s ability to work cooperatively towards a common goal. In addition, collaboration is often impeded by barriers of time, space, and organization:

• Code must be maintained, improved, and used long after it’s written. Programmers who collaborate on a project may not be working on it at the same time, so they may not be in a position to talk things over and keep each other informed about details of the implementation.

• Even if programmers work on the same project at the same time, they may not be located in the same place. This also inhibits how closely they can work together.

• Programmers working in different groups with different priorities and different schedules often must collaborate on projects. Communication across organizational barriers isn’t always easy to achieve.

The answer to these difficulties must grow out of the way programs are designed and written. It can’t be imposed from the outside in the form of hierarchical management structures and strict levels of authority. These often get in the way of people’s creativity, and become burdens in and of themselves. Rather, collaboration must be built into the work itself.

That’s where object-oriented programming techniques can help. For example, the reusability of object-oriented code means that programmers can collaborate effectively, even when they work on different projects at different times or are in different organizations, just by sharing their code in libraries. This kind of collaboration holds a great deal of promise, for it can conceivably lighten difficult tasks and make seemingly impossible projects achievable.

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