A Comprehensive Evaluation of Workspace Awareness in Software Configuration Management Systems

A. Sarma, D. Redmiles, and A. van der Hoek, A Comprehensive Evaluation of Workspace Awareness in Software Configuration Management Systems, Short paper in IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, Coeur d'Alène, Idaho, September, 2007 (Accepted) --- Workspace awareness has emerged as a new coordination paradigm in software configuration management systems, enabling the early detection of potential conflicts by providing developers with information of relevant, parallel activities. The focus of our work has been on detecting and mitigating both direct and indirect conflicts by unobtrusively sharing information about ongoing code changes. In this paper, we discuss the results of user experiments designed as a broad and formative evaluation of workspace awareness, specifically focusing on whether users detect conflicts as they arise and act to mitigate potential problems. Our results confirm that workspace awareness pro-motes active self-coordination among users and leads to an improved end-product in terms of the number of unresolved conflicts remaining in the code.

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