Crystal: precise and unobtrusive conflict warnings

Authors:
Yuriy Brun;Reid Holmes;Michael D. Ernst;David Notkin
Affiliations:
University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA;University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, USA;University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA;University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
Venue:
Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGSOFT symposium and the 13th European conference on Foundations of software engineering
Year:
2011

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Proactive detection of collaboration conflicts

Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGSOFT symposium and the 13th European conference on Foundations of software engineering

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Abstract

During collaborative development, individual developers can create conflicts in their copies of the code. Such conflicting edits are frequent in practice, and resolving them can be costly. We present Crystal, a tool that proactively examines developers' code and precisely identifies and reports on textual, compilation, and behavioral conflicts. When conflicts are present, Crystal enables developers to resolve them more quickly, and therefore at a lesser cost. When conflicts are absent, Crystal increases the developers' confidence that it is safe to merge their code. Crystal uses an unobtrusive interface to deliver pertinent information about conflicts. It informs developers about actions that would address the conflicts and about people with whom they should communicate.