Collaborative development can be hampered when conflicts arise because developers have inconsistent copies of a shared project. We present an approach to help developers identify and resolve conflicts early, before those conflicts become severe and before relevant changes fade away in the developers' memories. This paper presents three results.
First, a study of open-source systems establishes that conflicts are frequent, persistent, and appear not only as overlapping textual edits but also as subsequent build and test failures. The study spans nine open-source systems totaling 3.4 million lines of code; our conflict data is derived from 550,000 development versions of the systems.
Second, using previously-unexploited information, we precisely diagnose important classes of conflicts using the novel technique of speculative analysis over version control operations.
Third, we describe the design of Crystal, a publicly-available tool that uses speculative analysis to make concrete advice unobtrusively available to developers, helping them identify, manage, and prevent conflicts.
@inproceedings{Brun11fse,
author = {Yuriy Brun and Reid Holmes and Michael D. Ernst and David Notkin},
title =
{\href{http://people.cs.umass.edu/brun/pubs/pubs/Brun11fse.pdf}{Proactive
detection of collaboration conflicts}},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 8th Joint Meeting of the European Software
Engineering Conference and ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of
Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE)},
venue = {ESEC/FSE},
month = {September},
year = {2011},
date = {5--9},
pages = {168--178},
address = {Szeged, Hungary},
doi = {10.1145/2025113.2025139},
accept = {$\frac{34}{203} \approx 17\%$},
note = {\raisebox{-.5ex}{\includegraphics[height=2.5ex]{trophy}}~ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award. A previous version appeared
as University of Washington technical report UW-CSE-10-03-01.
\href{https://doi.org/10.1145/2025113.2025139}{DOI:
10.1145/2025113.2025139}},
comment = {<span class="emphasis">ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award</span>},
previous = {<span style="color:red">ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper</span>. A
previous version appeared as University of Washington technical report
UW-CSE-10-03-01.},
abstract = {<p>Collaborative development can be hampered when conflicts arise
because developers have inconsistent copies of a shared project. We present
an approach to help developers identify and resolve conflicts early, before
those conflicts become severe and before relevant changes fade away in the
developers' memories. This paper presents three results.</p>
<p>First, a study of open-source systems establishes that conflicts are
frequent, persistent, and appear not only as overlapping textual edits but
also as subsequent build and test failures. The study spans nine open-source
systems totaling 3.4 million lines of code; our conflict data is derived
from 550,000 development versions of the systems.</p>
<p>Second, using previously-unexploited information, we precisely diagnose
important classes of conflicts using the novel technique of speculative
analysis over version control operations.</p>
<p>Third, we describe the design of Crystal, a publicly-available tool that
uses speculative analysis to make concrete advice unobtrusively available to
developers, helping them identify, manage, and prevent conflicts.</p>},
fundedBy = {NSF CNS-0937060 to the CRA for the CIFellows Project,
NSF CCF-0963757, NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship,
Microsoft Research via a SEIF award},
}