Internet of Things (IoT) is comprised of interacting networks of physical, computational, and human components that coordinate to fulfill time-sensitive functions in their environment. The development of these systems spans all industrial sectors and demands collaborative effort between research and development teams from multiple institutions. Realizing the full potential of IoT requires interoperability between heterogeneous systems and development processes supported by robust platforms for experimentation and testing across domains. Meanwhile, current design and management approaches for these systems are domain-specific and would benefit from a more universally applicable approach.The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and its partner, the Institute for Software Integrated Systems at Vanderbilt University, have developed a collaborative experiment development environment that integrates best-of-breed tools including programming languages, network simulators, simulation platforms, hardware in the loop, and others. This environment integrates these tools into a standardized communications protocol, IEEE Standard 1516 High Level Architecture (HLA), and provides a graphical modeling language where simulators can easily be configured into different experimental configurations. Its code generation capabilities transform these simple models into executable simulations and code pre-configured to communicate using the standardized HLA services. This environment is called the Universal CPS Environment for Federation (UCEF). UCEF is distributed as a portable, self-contained Ubuntu Virtual Machine which allows it to run on any computational platform.