Collaborative editing is a major research topic within synchronous CSCW-applications. While preserving some kind of consistency and transparency, it allows different users at different locations to edit a shared document at the same time. In the past a variety of different approaches have been designed with different functionality ranging from pure shared outline editors to fully distributed document preparation systems. Software-engineering projects are an ideal playground because they typically consist of a variety of different small subproject documents. The impact of collaborative editors to SE projects is discussed. Furthermore, we develop design concepts that should be essential for user-friendly collaborative editing and collaboration-aware group interaction. A collaborative editor, called IRIS, has been prototypically implemented to improve SE project handling. It supports distributed editing with replicated data and provides dynamic voting for consistency as well as sophisticated notication mechanisms in the context of well-structured documents.
Borghoff et al. (1993) studied this question.