Abstract:
Collaboration is the cooperation of individuals in order to attain a common
goal. In line with this concept, work
ows may be employed to systematize cer-
tain procedures necessary to conduct a research or a project. Using work
ows
relative to collaboration yields increased e ciency, better process control,
exibil-
ity and process optimization. Meanwhile to adapt with the distributed model of
organization of most software development teams, distributed version control sys-
tems (DVCSs) are rapidly gaining ground as the preferred architecture of projects
over the traditional centralized systems. O ine operations, experimental branches
and easy peer-to-peer collaboration are but some of the reasons why developers
are making the switch.
Although CSCoRE integrates e ective project management and availability
of tools in one collaborative environment, it fairly lacks two substantial features
relevant to research and development in Computer Science. First, it has no support
for work
ow management and second, it does not o er Git DVCS.
With the Computer Science Collaborative Research Environment (CSCoRE)
2.0, the collaboratory gains a step up on its purpose of being a bene cial tool for
collaboration speci cally for projects in the eld of Computer Science through the
addition of the modules ProcessMaker and Git repository. ProcessMaker provides
CSCoRE with an embedded work
ow management system in which pertinent
work
ows tailored to the needs of a project can be utilized to streamline the
ow
of information among members of the team. The Git repository on the other hand,
o ers users the ability to conveniently browse and obtain version controlled les
of a project. Through this, the distributed nature of Git gives enough
exibility
to t well with the structure on how most software development teams collaborate
and contribute.
