Using a peer-to-peer architecture to support distributed software development

A great deal of software is developed by teams, and these teams will often have members who work from different locations. Distributed software development tools facilitate the collaboration of these non co-located members and teams. These tools usually rely on a client-server architecture, which means that teams have to relinquish control of their intellectual property (IP) that is used for collaboration, because data is stored in a central location. The peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture allows a team to flexibly manage its IP when working temporarily with other teams in a virtual enterprise environment. This paper includes the motivation for this research, a discussion of the design issues, and a description of the tool that was implemented using Java and the P2P technology JXTA. A qualitative analysis was also done to assess whether the goals were reached, and to provide a comparison between MASE P2P and other distributed software development tools.