There are many project development tools developed and commercialized in the past ten years. However, most of these tools' architecture is designed for development by teams located at the same location. Most of these tools do not provide any mechanism to protect the intellectual property (IP) assets created during the project. With the recent momentum for companies to use globally distributed teams and suppliers, the problems caused by a lack of a mechanism to protect the IP assets is exacerbated because other countries do not have the legal mechanisms to pursue people that have stolen the IP assets. Thus, it is desirable to provide a system that provides IP asset protection within a project development tool.
More recently, commercial tools became available where data collected from other development tools, called from the development process, are integrated to better estimate the productivity. These tools usually provide Web-based user interfaces for the convenience of sharing the views by the distributed teams. However, none of these tools has included the important capability of source code IP or data protection especially during the development time. The lack of focus on IP protection in the planning phase can create two problems when executing the plan:                The concern of losing source code IP will arise when dispatching tasks to remote teams, and the plan will then become one that does not leverage the true potential of the remote team.        During execution time, there are few actions that a user can take to fully mitigate the risk of losing the source code IP and the available actions are mostly rigid and make the project development un-flexible and more costly.        
Thus, it is desirable to provide a method and system for creating secure virtual project rooms that overcomes the limitations of the typical project development tools and it is to this end that the present invention is directed.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds