Continuous Analysis of Collaborative Design

Abstract

In collaborative design, architects' individual design decisions may conflict and, when joined, may violate system consistency rules or non-functional requirements. These design conflicts can hinder collaboration and result in wasted effort. Proactive detection of code-level conflicts has been shown to improve collaborative productivity, however, the computational resource requirements for proactively computing design conflicts have hindered its applicability in practice. Our survey and interviews of 50 architects from six large software companies find that 60% of their projects involve collaborative design, that architects consider integration costly, and that design conflicts are frequent and lead to lost work. To aid collaborative design, we re-engineer FLAME, our prior design conflict detection technique, to use cloud resources and a novel prioritization algorithm that, together, achieve efficient and nonintrusive conflict detection, and guarantee a bound on the time before a conflict is discovered. Two controlled experiments with 90 students trained in software architecture in a professional graduate program, demonstrate that architects using FLAME design more efficiently, produce higher-quality designs, repair conflicts faster, and prefer using FLAME. An empirical performance evaluation demonstrates FLAME's scalability and verifies its time-bound guarantees.