Cassandra: Proactive conflict minimization through optimized task scheduling

Abstract

Abstract-Software conflicts arising because of conflicting changes are a regular occurrence and delay projects. The main precept of workspace awareness tools has been to identify potential conflicts early, while changes are still small and easier to resolve. However, in this approach conflicts still occur and require developer time and effort to resolve. We present a novel conflict minimization technique that proactively identifies potential conflicts, encodes them as constraints, and solves the constraint space to recommend a set of conflict-minimal development paths for the team. Here we present a study of four open source projects to characterize the distribution of conflicts and their resolution efforts. We then explain our conflict minimization technique and the design and implementation of this technique in our prototype, Cassandra. We show that Cassandra would have successfully avoided a majority of conflicts in the four open source test subjects. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach by applying the technique to a simulated set of scenarios with higher than normal incidence of conflicts.

An Empirical Study on Recommendations of Similar Bugs

“…Cassandra is a task recommender that aims to schedule the maintenance work in order to minimize conflicting changes in parallel software development [27]. The system relies on Mylyn to get contextual data, which is communicated to a centralized scheduler component.…”

Supporting Developers' Coordination in the IDE

“…A recent significant effort in the software engineering research community is devoted to detect concurrent modifications to software artifacts (e.g., [35,36,59,65]). In fact, developers making inconsistent changes to the same part of the code can cause merge conflicts when changes are committed to the code repository, which leads to wasted developers' efforts and project delays [13,42,66]. Grinter conducted one of the first field studies that investigated developers' coordination strategies [29].…”

How to evaluate a conflict minimizing task scheduler through a user study

“…To test the feasibility of evaluating and solving constraints among developer tasks in a project, we first conducted an artifact-only study of Cassandra [6]. Here we briefly discuss the study and the challenges we faced, as they have a bearing on our future studies including user experiments.…”

“…We then present the research questions that we would like to answer when evaluating our prototype, Cassandra, which is an optimized task scheduling, awareness tool [6]. We provide here an initial plan for a user study to evaluate Cassandra, however, our main goal is to use the workshop for seeking feedback on the design of our user study.…”

“…CASSANDRA Cassandra is a novel task scheduling system that aims to minimize conflicts by recommending task orders that restrict dependent tasks or tasks that share common files from being concurrently edited [6]. Cassandra enables a proactive conflict minimization technique by identifying potential conflicts between tasks if they are performed in parallel, and consequently recommends conflict-free tasks to developers.…”