It allows all of the team members to register for alerts indicating new discussion items or documents. It also allows them to manage major development efforts with hierarchical project breakdowns, tasking, and reporting. Source code archive A distributed development project requires source code management software that works over the Internet. CVS is itself open source software. Future integrated code management environments Singleton sees a rapidly emerging category of providers that will offer distributed development environments with integrated communications and source management.
Developers rely on heavy-duty database servers and clusters of application servers.
In contrast, a distributed development team needs a development environment that is accessible and easy to set up and modify. In the early days of the Internet, the programmers were distributed, but the code was not. A distributed group of developers could use telnet or X terminals to connect to central computers, edit their code, and run programming tools. Open source developers use a different technique. Typically, all of the code and tools required to set up a development environment can be acquired at minimal cost, downloaded, and installed on a workstation with modest resources.