Investigating syntactic and semantic inconsistencies in Collaborative Software Development

Abstract

Since more than a few decades now, Software Configuration Management (SCM) systems have played a key role in orchestrating concurrent activities of collaborative developers. These SCM systems help in maintaining consistency of volatile codebases that are being frequently modified in order to accommodate change. Additionally, various Collaborative Software Development (CSD) tools have been developed to supplement the underlying SCMs, and provide workspace awareness information to software developers. These tools inform developers about possibilities of arising inconsistencies in project codebase due to concurrent activities by collaborative developers on shared artifacts. This paper elaborates on scenarios of collaborative activities of software developers that introduce syntactic and semantic inconsistencies in the project repositories. Furthermore, a discussion on the current state-of-art research in the area of CSD tools is presented, together with their major contributions. The paper identifies, the crucial problem of semantic inconsistencies caused due to behavioral changes on artifacts that has not been sufficiently addressed by existing CSD tools. Finally, a novel method to capture indirect conflicts (syntactic and semantic) is proposed which uses dependency graphs, with proposed additional notations.

Supporting collaborative software development over GitHub

“…Furthermore, semantic inconsistencies are sub‐categorized into those caused because of structural or behavioral changes. Structural semantic inconsistencies (denoted as …”

“…(build)) might be caused because of addition or deletion of classes, methods or attributes, whereas, behavioral semantic inconsistencies (denoted as ) are mostly caused because of modification of these . Although syntactic inconsistencies can also be classified using such a classification, we do not consider it here, for two reasons.…”

“…Classification of Conflicts in Collaborative Software Development . [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]…”

“…However, these SCM systems have limited features to capture indirect conflicts that arise because of dependency relationship between shared artifacts. Indirect conflicts lead to the introduction of syntactic and semantic inconsistencies in the project codebases.…”

“…Palantír , CASI , CollabVS , ProxiScientia , Conflicts , etc., are some of the tools that capture possibilities of arising indirect conflicts. However, these tools fail to effectively capture semantic inconsistencies because of behavioral changes . Additionally, tools like TUKAN , Jazz , Augur , FASTDash , WIPDash , CARES and Team Radar also provide detailed presence awareness information through resource‐centric and people‐centric dashboards or other forms of graphical visualizations.…”