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Palantír: Early Detection of Development Conflicts Arising from Parallel Code Changes
July-Aug. 2012 (vol. 38 no. 4)
pp. 889-908
ASCII Text
x 
 
Anita Sarma, David F. Redmiles, André van der Hoek, "Palantír: Early Detection of Development Conflicts Arising from Parallel Code Changes," IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 38, no. 4, pp. 889-908, July-Aug., 2012.
 
 
BibTex
x
 
@article{ 10.1109/TSE.2011.64,
author = {Anita Sarma and David F. Redmiles and André van der Hoek},
title = {Palantír: Early Detection of Development Conflicts Arising from Parallel Code Changes},
journal ={IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering},
volume = {38},
number = {4},
issn = {0098-5589},
year = {2012},
pages = {889-908},
doi = {http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TSE.2011.64},
publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
address = {Los Alamitos, CA, USA},
}
 
 
RefWorks Procite/RefMan/Endnote
x 
 
TY - JOUR
JO - IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
TI - Palantír: Early Detection of Development Conflicts Arising from Parallel Code Changes
IS - 4
SN - 0098-5589
SP889
EP908
EPD - 889-908
A1 - Anita Sarma,
A1 - David F. Redmiles,
A1 - André van der Hoek,
PY - 2012
KW - Software engineering
KW - computer-supported collaborative work
KW - programmer workbench
KW - configuration management
VL - 38
JA - IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
ER -
 
Anita Sarma, University of Nebraska- Lincoln, Lincoln
David F. Redmiles, University of California, Irvine, Irvine
André van der Hoek, University of California, Irvine, Irvine
The earlier a conflict is detected, the easier it is to resolve—this is the main precept of workspace awareness. Workspace awareness seeks to provide users with information of relevant ongoing parallel changes occurring in private workspaces, thereby enabling the early detection and resolution of potential conflicts. The key approach is to unobtrusively inform developers of potential conflicts arising because of concurrent changes to the same file and dependency violations in ongoing parallel work. This paper describes our research goals, approach, and implementation of workspace awareness through Palantír and includes a comprehensive evaluation involving two laboratory experiments. We present both quantitative and qualitative results from the experiments, which demonstrate that the use of Palantír, as compared to not using Palantír 1) leads to both earlier detection and earlier resolution of a larger number of conflicts, 2) leaves fewer conflicts unresolved in the code base that was ultimately checked in, and 3) involves reasonable overhead. Furthermore, we report on interesting changes in users' behavior, especially how conflict resolution strategies changed among Palantír users.

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Index Terms:
Software engineering, computer-supported collaborative work, programmer workbench, configuration management
Citation:
Anita Sarma, David F. Redmiles, André van der Hoek, "Palantír: Early Detection of Development Conflicts Arising from Parallel Code Changes," IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 38, no. 4, pp. 889-908, July-Aug. 2012, doi:10.1109/TSE.2011.64
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