Proposal of a collaborative software development platform for the virtual universities: The Virtual University of the Senegal (UVS) experience

This paper presents a collaborative software development platform allowing traditional and virtual universities actors who are geographically distant to work on a software development project using common (usual) programming languages. In the context of the virtual universities operating in the field of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), pratical classes are needed to acquire and to enhance the necessary skills particularly in software engineering. To the various actors of these digital and traditional universities making some e-learning, this paper supplies a preconfigured collaborative software development environment including synchronization of files belonging to a given project, instant messaging, audio and video. Our platform has an administration interface allowing the management of permissions and preconfigured virtual machines allocation to the various actors. To reach our goals, we used the XMPP protocol for instant messaging and file synchronization. Then, we used WebRTC for audio and video between actors. Finally, we used the RDP protocol to allow the access to the virtual machines. In this work, we show how our platform was used by the Virtual University of the Senegal (UVS) teachers and students in the field of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science for some pratical classes about C/C++, Java, Python and PHP programming languages.