research-article

CASI: preventing indirect conflicts through a live visualization

Authors:

Francisco Servant,

James A. Jones,

André van der HoekAuthors Info & Claims

CHASE '10: Proceedings of the 2010 ICSE Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering

Pages 39 - 46

https://doi.org/10.1145/1833310.1833317

Published: 02 May 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Software development is a collaborative activity that may lead to conflicts when changes are performed in parallel by several developers. Direct conflicts arise when multiple developers make changes in the same source code entity, and indirect conflicts are produced when multiple developers make changes to source code entities that depend on each other. Previous approaches of code analysis either cannot predict all kinds of indirect conflicts, since they can be caused by syntactic or semantic changes, or they produce so much information as to make them virtually useless. Workspace awareness techniques have been proposed to enhance software configuration management systems by providing developers with information about the activity that is being performed by other developers. Most workspace awareness tools detect direct conflicts while only some of them warn about potential indirect conflicts. We propose a new approach to the problem of indirect conflicts. Our tool CASI informs developers of the changes that are taking place in a software project and the source code entities influenced by them. We visualize this influence together with directionality and severity information to help developers decide whether a concrete situation represents an indirect conflict. We introduce our approach, explain its implementation, discuss its behavior on an example, and lay out several steps that we will be taking to improve it in the future.

References

[1]

Apache Subversion. http://subversion.apache.org/

[2]

I. Almeida Da Silva, P. H. Chen, C. van der Westhuizen, R. M. Ripley, and A. van der Hoek, "Lighthouse: coordination through emerging design," Proceedings of the 2006 OOPSLA workshop on eclipse technology eXchange, 2006, p. 15.

Digital Library

[3]

S. Bajracharya, J. Ossher, and C. Lopes, "Sourcerer: An internet-scale software repository," Proceedings of the 2009 ICSE Workshop on Search-Driven Development-Users, Infrastructure, Tools and Evaluation, 2009, pp. 1--4.

Digital Library

[4]

Li-Te Cheng, S. Ross, and J. Patterson, "Jazzing up Eclipse with collaborative tools," Proceedings of the 2003 OOPSLA workshop on eclipse technology eXchange, 2003, pp. 45--49.

Digital Library

[5]

CVS - Open Source Version Control. http://www.nongnu.org/cvs/

[6]

P. Deitel and H. Deitel, Java#8482; how to program, 2006.

[7]

Eclipse. http://www.eclipse.org

[8]

R. Hegde and P. Dewan, "Connecting programming environments to support ad-hoc collaboration," 23rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, 2008. ASE 2008, 2008, pp. 178--187.

Digital Library

[9]

Java Primitive Data Types. http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/java/nutsandbolts/datatypes.html

[10]

B. Magnusson and U. Asklund, "Fine grained version control of configurations in COOP/Orm," Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1996, pp. 31--48.

Digital Library

[11]

A. Sarma, G. Bortis, and A. van der Hoek, "Towards supporting awareness of indirect conflicts across software configuration management workspaces," Proceedings of the twenty-second IEEE/ACM international conference on Automated software engineering, 2007, pp. 94--103.

Digital Library

[12]

T. Schümmer and J. M. Haake, "Supporting distributed software development by modes of collaboration," Proceedings of the seventh conference on European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2001, p. 98.

Digital Library

[13]

D. Shao, S. Khurshid, and D. E. Perry, "Evaluation of semantic interference detection in parallel changes: an exploratory experiment," Compare, vol. 4, p. 5.

[14]

M. A. Storey, D. Čubranić, and D. M. German, "On the use of visualization to support awareness of human activities in software development: a survey and a framework," Proceedings of the 2005 ACM symposium on Software visualization, 2005, pp. 193--202.

Digital Library

[15]

C. van der Westhuizen, P. H. Chen, and A. van der Hoek, "Emerging design: new roles and uses for abstraction," Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Role of abstraction in software engineering, 2006, p. 28.

Digital Library

[16]

M. Weiser, "Program slicing," Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Software engineering, 1981, pp. 439--449.

Digital Library

Cited By

Aldndni WMeng NServant F(2023)Automatic prediction of developers’ resolutions for software merge conflictsJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2023.111836206(111836)Online publication date: Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2023.111836
Arora RMaurya ASharma YKannan M(2021)A comprehensive framework and tool for supporting progressive learning of software development in an academic learning environmentComputer Applications in Engineering Education10.1002/cae.2246030:2(362-383)Online publication date: 20-Sep-2021
https://doi.org/10.1002/cae.22460
Brindescu CAhmed ILeano RSarma ARothermel GBae D(2020)Planning for untanglingProceedings of the ACM/IEEE 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3377811.3380344(801-811)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3377811.3380344
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

CASI: preventing indirect conflicts through a live visualization
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software post-development issues
      1. Software version control
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. Development frameworks and environments
      1. Integrated and visual development environments
    2. Software configuration management and version control systems

Recommendations

Empirical evidence of the benefits of workspace awareness in software configuration management
SIGSOFT '08/FSE-16: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of software engineering

In this paper, we present results from our empirical evaluations of a workspace awareness tool that we designed and implemented to augment the functionality of software configuration management systems. Particularly, we performed two user experiments ...
Reconciling transactional conflicts with compiler's help
CGO '12: Proceedings of the Tenth International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization

Software transactional memory(STM) is a promising programming paradigm for shared memory multithreaded programs. While STM offers the promise of being less error-prone and more programmer friendly compared to traditional lock-based synchronization, it ...
An Analysis of Merge Conflicts and Resolutions in Git-Based Open Source Projects

Version control systems such as Git support parallel collaborative work and became very widespread in the open-source community. Whilst Git offers some very interesting features, resolving conflicts that arise during synchronisation of parallel changes ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CHASE '10: Proceedings of the 2010 ICSE Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering

May 2010

127 pages

ISBN:9781605589664

DOI:10.1145/1833310

General Chairs:
Yvonne Dittrich
IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
,
Cleidson de Souza
IBM Brazil, Brazil
,
Mikko Korpela
University of Eastern Finland, Finland
,
Helen Sharp
Open University, UK
,
Janice Singer
NRC, Canada
,
Heike Winshiers-Theophilus
Polytechnic of Namibia, Namibia

Copyright © 2010 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 02 May 2010

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

ICSE '10

Sponsor:

SIGSOFT

ICSE '10: 32nd International Conference on Software Engineering

May 2, 2010

Cape Town, South Africa

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 47 of 70 submissions, 67%

Upcoming Conference

ICSE 2025

2025 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering

April 26 - May 3, 2025

Ottawa , ON , Canada

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

20
Total Citations
View Citations
246
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)8
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1

Reflects downloads up to 09 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Aldndni WMeng NServant F(2023)Automatic prediction of developers’ resolutions for software merge conflictsJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2023.111836206(111836)Online publication date: Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2023.111836
Arora RMaurya ASharma YKannan M(2021)A comprehensive framework and tool for supporting progressive learning of software development in an academic learning environmentComputer Applications in Engineering Education10.1002/cae.2246030:2(362-383)Online publication date: 20-Sep-2021
https://doi.org/10.1002/cae.22460
Brindescu CAhmed ILeano RSarma ARothermel GBae D(2020)Planning for untanglingProceedings of the ACM/IEEE 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3377811.3380344(801-811)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3377811.3380344
Kishikawa MKakeshita T(2020)A Visualization Tool for Relationship between Source Code and Parse Tree Using VR2020 9th International Congress on Advanced Applied Informatics (IIAI-AAI)10.1109/IIAI-AAI50415.2020.00047(203-208)Online publication date: Sep-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/IIAI-AAI50415.2020.00047
Brindescu CRamirez YSarma AJensen C(2020)Lifting the Curtain on Merge Conflict Resolution: A Sensemaking Perspective2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)10.1109/ICSME46990.2020.00057(534-545)Online publication date: Sep-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME46990.2020.00057
Brindescu CAhmed IJensen CSarma A(2019)An empirical investigation into merge conflicts and their effect on software qualityEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-019-09735-4Online publication date: 5-Sep-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-019-09735-4
Nelson NBrindescu CMcKee SSarma ADig D(2019)The life-cycle of merge conflicts: processes, barriers, and strategiesEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-018-9674-xOnline publication date: 5-Feb-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-018-9674-x
Arora RGoel SMittal R(2017)Supporting collaborative software development in academic learning environment: A collaborative pair and quadruple programming based approach2017 Tenth International Conference on Contemporary Computing (IC3)10.1109/IC3.2017.8284330(1-7)Online publication date: Aug-2017
https://doi.org/10.1109/IC3.2017.8284330
Ahmed IBrindescu CMannan UJensen CSarma ABener ATurhan BBiffl S(2017)An empirical examination of the relationship between code smells and merge conflictsProceedings of the 11th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement10.1109/ESEM.2017.12(58-67)Online publication date: 9-Nov-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ESEM.2017.12
Arora RGoel SMittal R(2017)Supporting collaborative software development over GitHubSoftware—Practice & Experience10.1002/spe.246847:10(1393-1416)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/spe.2468
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents