A Framework and Tool for Supporting Collaborative Work in Software Development

Abstract

Software Configuration Management (SCM) systems are the earliest and one of the most innovative facilitators of Collaborative Software Development (CSD) processes among software development teams. These SCM systems are efficient enough to provide support for sharing project repositories among software developers and enable concurrent editing of shared artifacts. However, SCM systems do not provide support for real-time collaborative software development. Collaborative developers are informed about changes made by others only when the changes have been check-in into the project repository. In order to recognize current advances in this area, an exhaustive review of the existing CSD tools that supplement SCM systems and provide support for real-time collaborative software development processes was carried out. It is realized that there is a need and scope to address the requirements and implementation of a CSD tool that would provide enhanced real-time support for the same. Considering these gaps, this thesis intends to propose taxonomy for describing collaborative work practices of software developers and realizes the proposed taxonomy through the implementation of a tool prototype that provides real-time support for facilitating collaborative engagements of software developers. In this process, a framework which establishes the relationship between the dimensions that influence collaborative work and CSD tool functionalities essential to handle these influences; a classification of existing CSD tools; and requirements specifications for a CSD environment have also been proposed. Besides this, a classification of conflicts arising due to concurrent activities of collaborative developers over shared project repositories has also been proposed, along with a proposed solution to capture these conflicts. Additionally, the proposed solution to capture conflicts has also been implemented as a tool prototype. The complete implementation of the tool prototype developed as a part of this research work has been open-sourced