Coordinating Software Development through Predictive Conflict Detection

Distributed software development poses many challenges. One of the main factors is the complexity of technical dependencies existing in the code base, which leads to complex social-technical dependencies among developers. This social-technical complexity inevitably leads to software conflicts because of coordination problems. Recently, we have been witnessing the development of new kinds of collaborative technology, and variations on existing technologies that support new collaborative development practices. New trends in organization of distributed, collaborative work and the development of new technologies supporting it result in an intriguing interplay of people and technology, which motivates my research in supporting coordination in software development. In this talk, I will discuss new coordination tools developed by my group. In particular I will focus on a novel conflict minimization technique that proactively identifies potential conflicts, encodes them as constraints, and solves the constraints space to recommend a set of conflict-minimal development paths.

Speaker Details

Anita Sarma is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Previously, she was a Post-Doctoral fellow at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She holds a Ph.D. degree in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests are at the intersection of software engineering and computer-supported cooperative work. She seeks to understand how factors such as interdependencies among work artifacts, design erosion of the work product, and organizational culture affect coordination; and create effective coordination solutions for distributed development by identifying the kinds of information required for coordination, the means of generating and distributing such information, and ways to present it.

Series:
Microsoft Research Talks
Date:
Speakers:
Anita Sarma
Affiliation:
University of Nebraska

Series: Microsoft Research Talks