Proactive Detection of Higher-Order Software Design Conflicts

Abstract

Software architects who collaboratively evolve a software model rely on version control systems (VCSs) to synchronize their individual changes to the model. However, with the current generation of software model VCSs, architects remain unaware of newly arising conflicts until the next synchronization, raising the risk that delayed conflict resolution will be much harder. There are existing tools that proactively detect analogous conflicts at the level of source code. However, it is challenging to directly use them for software models because those tools are constructed to manage code-level rather than model-level changes. Furthermore, no empirical data is currently available regarding the impact of proactive conflict detection on collaborative design. In this paper, we report on our design-level proactive conflict detection research, which specifically targets a class of higher-order conflicts that do not prevent merging but do violate a system's consistency rule. We present FLAME, an extensible, operation-based collaborative software design framework that proactively detects conflicts. We also present a user study result involving FLAME conducted with 42 participants. The study indicated that the participants who used FLAME were able to create higher quality models in the same amount of time, and to detect and resolve higher-order conflicts earlier and more quickly.