Developing a collective operation for execution in a parallel computer that includes compute nodes coupled for data communications through one or more data communication networks, including: receiving, by a collective development tool, a specification of a target collective operation to develop; receiving, by the collective development tool, a specification of computer hardware characteristics of the parallel computer within which the target collective operation will be executed; selecting, by the collective development tool automatically without user interaction, iteratively for each stage of the target collective operation, a collective primitive in dependence upon the specification of computer hardware characteristics and a predefined set of rules specifying selection criteria of collective primitives based on computer hardware characteristics; and generating, by the collective development tool, the target collective operation in dependence upon the selected collective primitives.