Lighthouse: coordination through emerging design

Despite the fact that software development is an inherently collaborative activity, a great deal of software development is spent with developers in isolation, working on their own parts of the system. In these situations developers are unaware of parallel changes being made by others, often resulting in conflicts. One common approach to deal with this issue is called conflict resolution, which means that changes have already been checked-in and developers must use merge tools to resolve conflicts and then retest the code to ensure its correctness. Unfortunately, this process becomes more difficult the longer the conflicts go undetected. In order to address these issues, have been proposed conflict avoidance approaches that detect conflicts as soon as they occur. In this paper, we present Lighthouse, an Eclipse plug-in that takes the conflict avoidance approach to coordinate developers. Lighthouse distinguishes itself by utilizing a concept called emerging design, an up to date design representation of the code, to alert developers of potentially conflicting implementation changes as they occur, indicating where the changes have been made and by whom.