Unifying Configuration Management with Merge Conflict Detection and Awareness Systems

As software development becomes an increasingly collaborative effort, traditional development tools have to be extended to support seamless collaboration while minimizing the chances of conflicts. This paper describes Cloud Studio, a collaboration framework that integrates a fine-grained software configuration management model and a real-time awareness system. Cloud Studio's configuration management operates transparently by automatically sharing the changes of developers working on the same project, the real-time awareness system allows for dynamic views on the project selectively including or excluding other developers' changes. With this tight integration, conflicts are prevented in many cases, while leaving individual developers free to experiment without blocking others. The paper also describes a freely available prototype web-based implementation of Cloud Studio and a case study that demonstrates the usability of the approach for collaborative software development.