Minimizing software conflicts through proactive detection of conflicts and task scheduling

Abstract

Software conflicts arising because of conflicting changes are a regular occurrence and delay projects. Workspace awareness tools have been proposed to facilitate task coordination among developers, enabling them to identify potential conflicts early, while conflicts are still easy to resolve. However, these tools have limitations, as they identify conflicts after conflicts have already occurred and therefore, are unable to prevent developers’ time and effort spent in resolving the conflicts. The goal of this Ph.D. research is to: (1) characterize the distribution of conflicts, their frequency and the factors within a project that affects the distribution and frequency of conflicts, (2) design and implement a conflict minimization technique that proactively identifies potential conflicts by analyzing developers’ tasks and avoids them by scheduling tasks in a conflict minimal manner and (3) evaluate the proposed approach using historic data from OSS projects and through user evaluations. Thus far, we have implemented our approach and evaluated it with historic data from four OSS projects and through simulated data.