A collaborative development environment (CDE) is an online meeting space where a software development project's stakeholders

Project stakeholders

Project stakeholders are those entities within or outside an organization which:# sponsor a project, or# have an interest or a gain upon a successful completion of a project;# may have a positive or negative influence in the project completion....

 can work together, no matter what timezone or region they are in, to discuss, document, and produce project deliverables. The name was coined by Grady Booch

Grady Booch

Grady Booch is an American software engineer. Booch is best known for developing the Unified Modeling Language with Ivar Jacobson and James Rumbaugh. Grady is recognized internationally for his innovative work in software architecture, software engineering, and collaborative development environments...

.

It is seen as an evolution from the integrated development environment

Integrated development environment

An integrated development environment is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development...

 (IDE), which combined programming tools on the desktop, and the extended development environment (XDE), which combined lifecycle development tools with an IDE (such as Microsoft's Visual Studio Team System

Visual Studio Team System

Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management is a collection of integrated software development tools developed by Microsoft. These tools include IDEs, source control, work items, collaboration, metrics, and reporting tools.-Platform:...

 and the IBM Rational Rose XDE

IBM Rational Rose XDE

Rational Rose XDE, an "eXtended Development Environment" for software developers, integrates with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer...

); while the IDE focuses on tools to support the individual developer, the CDE focuses on supporting the needs of the development team as a whole.

Although growing from a tool base in the software development

Software development

Software development is the development of a software product...

 sector, the CDE has been taken up in other sectors, with teams typically geographically dispersed, where it is beneficial to be able to collaborate across the web, including automotive and aeronautical engineering, movie production, and civil engineering.

Typical Functionalities

• Version control system
• Bug tracking system
  Bug tracking system
  A bug tracking system is a software application that is designed to help quality assurance and programmers keep track of reported software bugs in their work. It may be regarded as a type of issue tracking system....
  
  
• Todo list
• Mailing list
  Mailing list
  A mailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. The term is often extended to include the people subscribed to such a list, so the group of subscribers is referred to as "the mailing list", or simply "the...
  
  
• Document management system
  Document management system
  A document management system is a computer system used to track and store electronic documents and/or images of paper documents. It is usually also capable of keeping track of the different versions created by different users . The term has some overlap with the concepts of content management...
  
  
• Forum
  Internet forum
  An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are at least temporarily archived...