VC2-Providing Awareness in Off-The-Shelf Version Control Systems
Daniel Mól Machado, Nuno Preguiça, Carlos Baquero, John Martins · Portuguese National Funding Agency for Science, Research and Technology (RCAAP Project by FCT) · 2007
Abstract. Version control systems have been used to help groups of people working at the same or distributed sites to cooperatively create documents. In particular, these systems are very popular in distributed collaborative software development. However, even using these systems, users often perform concurrent changes that require manual conflict resolution, as it was confirmed by a study on conflicts in cooperative software development. Important causes for this situation are the lack of mutual awareness and coordination, among developers, and reluctance to commit unstable modifications. The paper addresses this problem by providing a tool that integrates with off-the-shelf version control systems and monitors filesystem accesses to relevant files in order to enhance the awareness among developers. With V C 2 users can be aware of uncommitted changes made by remote users; receive request to commit their own changes; be advised to update their local versions. While the final decision is always under user control, the team is made aware of the level of risk when delaying commits and updates in their version control system of choice. 1