An Inconsistency Management Support System for Collaborative Software Development

Abstract

SUMMARYIn collaborative software developments, many change processes implementing change requests are executed concurrently by different workers. The fact that the workers do not have sufficient information about the others' work and complicated dependencies among artifacts can lead to unexpected inconsistencies among the artifacts impacted by the changes. Most previous studies concentrated only on concurrent changes and considered them separately. However, even when the changes are not concurrent, inconsistencies may still happen if a worker does not recognize the impact of the changes made by other workers on his changes or the impact of his changes on other workers' changes. In addition, the changes in a change process are related to each other through their common target of realizing the change request and the dependencies among the changed artifacts. Therefore, to handle inconsistencies more effectively, we concentrate on both concurrent and non-concurrent changes, and the context of a change, i.e. the change process containing the change, rather than the ongoing changes only. In this paper, we present an inconsistency awareness mechanism and a Change Support Workflow Management System (CSWMS) that realizes this mechanism. By monitoring the progress of the change processes and the ongoing changes in the client workspaces, CSWMS can notify the workers of a (potential) inconsistency in advance along with the context of the inconsistency, that is, the changes causing the inconsistency and the change processes containing these changes. Based on the information provided by CSWMS, the workers can detect and resolve inconsistencies more easily and quickly. Therefore, our research can contribute to building a safer and more efficient collaborative software development environment. key words: inconsistency awareness, context awareness, patterns of inconsistency, change process, collaborative software development