An Exploration of Indirect Conflicts
Date
2014-04-28
Authors
Ell, Jordan
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Abstract
Awareness techniques have been proposed and studied to aid developer understanding,
efficiency, and quality of software produced. Some of these techniques have focused on
either direct or indirect conflicts in order to prevent, detect, or resolve these conflicts as
they arise from a result of source code changes. While the techniques and tools for direct
conflicts have had large success, tools either proposed or studied for indirect conflicts have
had common issues of information overload, false positives, scalability, information distribution
and many others. To better understand these issues, this dissertation will focus on
exploring the world of indirect conflicts through 4 studies. The first two studies presented
will focus on motivational circumstances which occur during the software development
life cycle and cause indirect conflicts. Developers interactions are studied in order to create
a tool which can aid in the workflows around indirect conflicts. The second two studies
present a deeper investigation into why most indirect conflict tools fail to attract developer
interest through exploring the root causes of indirect conflicts and how tools should
be properly built to support developer workflows.
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Keywords
Awareness, Indirect Conflicts