The Peer-to-Peer Development Approach

Another common approach to team development projects is to maintain separate development environments for each developer and synchronize the development environments from time-to-time by merging changes from one environment directly into another. This approach is referred to as peer-to-peer development.

Peer-to-peer development is similar to master-slave development except there is no master environment. Each development environment exchanges information directly among one another. For example, if Steve and Carol from our master-slave scenario were instead operating in a peer-to-peer environment, they would import changes directly from one to the other rather than into the master.

The mechanisms provided by ZOM to support peer-to-peer development are the same as those for master-slave development as shown above. The only significant difference is that changes are merged directly into another development environment rather than a master environment.