Towards supporting awareness of indirect conflicts across software configuration management workspaces

Workspace awareness techniques have been proposed to enhance the effectiveness of software configuration management systems in coordinating parallel work. These techniques share information regarding ongoing changes, so potential conflicts can be detected during development, instead of when changes are completed and committed to a repository. To date, however, workspace awareness techniques only address direct conflicts, which arise due to concurrent changes to the same artifact, but are unable to support indirect conflicts, which arise due to ongoing changes in one artifact affecting concurrent changes in another artifact. In this paper, we present a new, cross-workspace awareness technique that supports one particular kind of indirect conflict, namely those indirect conflicts caused by changes to class signatures. We introduce our approach, discuss its implementation in our workspace awareness tool Palantír, illustrate its potential through two pilot studies, and lay out how to gen...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: KBSE
• Authors: Anita Sarma, Gerald Bortis, André van der Hoek
• Keywords: Indirect Conflicts, KBSE 2007, Software Configuration Management, Software Engineering, Workspace Awareness