A collaborative development environment (CDE) is an online meeting space where a software development project's stakeholders can work together, no matter what timezone or region they are in, to discuss, document, and produce project deliverables. The term was coined in 2002 by Grady Booch and Alan W. Brown.
It is seen as an evolution from the integrated development environment (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 and the IBM Rational Rose XDE); 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 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.