Annotation of concurrent changes in collaborative software development

Abstract

Studies showed that in large projects the partition of software modules is limited and developers can contribute to any part of the code. In traditional software development tools such as CVS and subversion users work in their local workspaces without being informed about concurrent modifications. This can lead to conflicting or redundant changes. We propose an awareness mechanism that informs users about the concurrent published changes by annotating the local project with these modifications. Users can continue working without integrating the concurrent changes being notified about the location of changes at different levels such as package, class, method and line. Users can also see the representation of the concurrent changes by consulting the annotations associated to code lines. We present the algorithms that implement our awareness approach.