History

This is very roughly how Saros happened:

  • Saros started as an idea of Stephan Salinger (research associate in the group of Prof. Lutz Prechelt at Freie Universität Berlin) in early 2006: Wouldn't it be great if both members of a pair programming team could each use their own machine?
    They would not even strictly need to be in the same room then (assuming some voice connection is present)!
  • He convinced his colleague Christopher Özbek and they decided to issue a topic for a diploma thesis that called for building a prototype of such a tool.
  • Riad Djemili took up the topic and developed the first version of Saros as an Eclipse plugin.
    It had a strict driver/observer model (with token handover) but worked reasonably well and had a strong-enough architecture to build upon it.
  • Christopher and Stephan decided Saros was worth pursuing and started working with a long string of students to extend and improve it:
    During 2008 to 2010, we added many things to Saros: concurrent editing, VoIP, screen sharing, a whiteboard for sketching, multi-project support, dynamic adding of files, text chat, NAT traversal, and various other functionality.
    Most of it initially did not work or was otherwise deficient (e.g too cryptic to find, too minimal, or plain crappy).
  • At the end of that extension period, Saros was fairly large, but totally unstable. Also, it was difficult to understand, both for Saros programmers and users.
  • So we entered a long period of consolidation (roughly 2011 to 2013): Fixing the nasty bugs, re-simplifying the now-contrived architecture that had provoked many of those defects, kicking out much of the non-core functionality the usefulness of which did not pay for its maintenance burden (in particular VoIP and screensharing), etc.
    Meanwhile, the senior people also changed: Christopher left and others took over the chief architect role from him, in particular Franz Zieris.
  • Another aspect of consolidation was a lot of investment in usability work to make Saros easy to install, understand, and use. Julia Schenk led many rounds of improvement in this regard.
  • One of our most capable students stuck after the end of his thesis work and is now a long-time volunteer open source contributor to Saros: Stefan Rossbach. Without him, Saros would not be what it is today.
  • At the end of this consolidation work, we are proud to say Saros is now an industrial-strength tool for synchronous distributed collaborative work.
    And we built this interactive, framework-heavy, real-time, distributed/concurrent (summing up: difficult) software with mostly inexperienced developers and a staff turnover of around 150% a year. Astonishing! (Refactoring works -- if you do it seriously.)
  • In 2014, we started to clean up the architecture even further by splitting Saros formally into two parts: An Eclipse-specific part (for the GUI and wiring) and the Eclipse-independend Saros Core (containing the data model, the networking stuff, and the concurrency logic).
  • An independent core also allows building session-compatible variants of Saros for other IDEs and we are now beginning to do this for IntelliJ IDEA.
    Lithuanian outsourcing provider NFQ is sponsoring this development by paying for a full-time developer, because they want to use Saros to introduce an Agile Offsharing work style between them and their customers.
  • ...to be continued

The following is a somewhat more complete list of contributors, small and large, to Saros:

  • Stephan Salinger
  • Christopher Özbek
  • Riad Djemili
  • Lutz Prechelt
  • Christoph Jacob
  • Björn Gustavs
  • Ulrich Stärk
  • Oliver Rieger
  • Marc Rintsch
  • Lisa Dohrmann
  • Sebastian Ziller
  • Tas Soti
  • Edna Rosen
  • Alena Kiwitt
  • Sandor Szücs
  • Olaf Loga
  • Stefan Lau
  • Henning Staib
  • Eike Starkmann
  • Karl Beecher
  • Florian Pütz
  • Benjamin Aschenbrenner
  • Tobias Albig
  • Robert Ende
  • Robert Fehrmann
  • Franz Gatzke
  • Dennis Gölde
  • Georg Graf
  • Cenk Gündogan
  • Muhammet Karakütük
  • Maximilian Lengsfeld
  • Ines Moosdorf
  • Miriam Ney
  • Jakob Pfender
  • Maximilien Riehl
  • Sebastian Schlaak
  • Simon Schmitt
  • Ramdane Sennoun
  • Jan Wötzel
  • Andreas Haferburg
  • Umut Erdogan
  • Michael Jurke
  • Sebastian Bauch
  • Patrick Bitterling
  • Lin Chen
  • Danou Nauck
  • Klaus Zöller
  • Björn Kahlert
  • Philipp Cordes
  • Christian Dohnert
  • Wjatscheslaw Belousow
  • Antonia Kresse
  • Benjamin Eckstein
  • Christian Kühl
  • Hartono Sugih
  • Hernando Saenz Sanchez
  • Maria Formisano
  • Markus Bischoff
  • Max Losch
  • Michael Prüm
  • Roman Stolzenburg
  • Simon Tippenhauer
  • Thea Schröter
  • Tu Tran
  • Karl Held
  • Arsenij Solovjev
  • Meike Johannsen
  • Alexander Narweleit
  • Franz Zieris
  • Alexander Waldmann
  • Norman Warnatsch
  • Hendrik Degener
  • Jennifer Möwert
  • Holger Freyther
  • Sascha Kretzschmann
  • Michael Scheppat
  • Vera Schlemm
  • Patrick Steinhardt
  • Maria Spiering
  • Sebastian Starroske
  • Lev Stejngardt
  • Richhard Möhn
  • Conrad Läßig
  • Christoph Krüger
  • Patrick Schlott
  • Nils Bussas
  • Andrej Szaffranietz
  • Raimondas Kvietkaukas
  • Holger Schmeisky