Crystal: Precise and unobtrusive conflict warnings
by Yuriy Brun, Reid Holmes, Michael D. Ernst, David Notkin
Abstract:
During collaborative development, individual developers can create conflicts in their copies of the code. Such conflicting edits are frequent in practice, and resolving them can be costly. We present Crystal, a tool that proactively examines developers' code and precisely identifies and reports on textual, compilation, and behavioral conflicts. When conflicts are present, Crystal enables developers to resolve them more quickly, and therefore at a lesser cost. When conflicts are absent, Crystal increases the developers' confidence that it is safe to merge their code. Crystal uses an unobtrusive interface to deliver pertinent information about conflicts. It informs developers about actions that would address the conflicts and about people with whom they should communicate.
Citation:
Yuriy Brun, Reid Holmes, Michael D. Ernst, and David Notkin, Crystal: Precise and unobtrusive conflict warnings, in Proceedings of the 8th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering Tool Demonstration Track (ESEC/FSE), 2011, pp. 444–447.
Bibtex:
@inproceedings{Brun11tool-demo-fse,
  author = {Yuriy Brun and Reid Holmes and Michael D. Ernst and David Notkin},
  title =
  {\href{http://people.cs.umass.edu/brun/pubs/pubs/Brun11fse-tool-demo.pdf}{Crystal:
  {P}recise and unobtrusive conflict warnings}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 8th Joint Meeting of the European Software
  Engineering Conference and ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of
  Software Engineering Tool Demonstration Track (ESEC/FSE)},
  venue = {ESEC/FSE Demo},
  month = {September},
  year = {2011},
  date = {5--9},
  pages = {444--447},
  address = {Szeged, Hungary},
  doi = {10.1145/2025113.2025187},
  accept = {$\frac{14}{30} \approx 47\%$},

  abstract = {During collaborative development, individual developers can
  create conflicts in their copies of the code. Such conflicting edits are
  frequent in practice, and resolving them can be costly. We present Crystal,
  a tool that proactively examines developers' code and precisely identifies
  and reports on textual, compilation, and behavioral conflicts. When
  conflicts are present, Crystal enables developers to resolve them more
  quickly, and therefore at a lesser cost. When conflicts are absent, Crystal
  increases the developers' confidence that it is safe to merge their code.
  Crystal uses an unobtrusive interface to deliver pertinent information about
  conflicts. It informs developers about actions that would address the
  conflicts and about people with whom they should communicate.},

  note = {\href{https://doi.org/10.1145/2025113.2025187}{DOI:
  10.1145/2025113.2025187}},

  fundedBy = {NSF CNS-0937060 to the CRA for the CIFellows Project, 
	NSF CCF-0963757, NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship,
  Microsoft Research via a SEIF award},
}