Software Development and Collaboration: Version Control Systems and Other Approaches

Abstract—In the current context of software developing, to provide an efficient way to coordinate efforts and organize projects turn out to be essential. In this area, Version Control Systems (VCSs) help users to work in a collaborative fashion in a conflict-free environment. The most used VCSs, such as CVS or SVN are proving to be inadequate to meet the current needs and they are losing ground against other systems like Git. This last one propose a decentralized architecture (instead of a centralized one like in CVS or SVN) to meet the increasingly demand of faster and more efficient VCSs because more and more often software projects are developed collaboratively. But not everything is about software development, today Internet is, more than ever, a social environment and other approaches for collaboration such as Google Wave take another step forward, allowing real-time collaborative editing between different users. I