CAREER: Conflict Minimization in Distributed Software Development

软件开发是一项复杂的社会技术活动，通常同时发生在分散的团队中，并在更大的组织目标和上下文中发生。当前的开发工具因软件密集型系统的规模而不堪重负，往往最终导致信息过载和协调故障，最终导致软件冲突和项目延误。这项研究试图建立对如何使用过去的开发数据和团队实践来主动识别任务之间的依赖关系和约束，并调度任务，以便将并行、分布式开发中的冲突更改降至最低的理解。这项工作将有助于：(1)形式化软件冲突及其与组织上下文的相互作用的冲突类型；(2)关于如何在生产率、质量和开发速度方面实现改进的知识；(3)分布式并行开发中冲突最小化的一套分析技术、设计原则、工具原型和交互方法。评估包括部署到实际的软件开发团队，以及对生成的工具的有效性进行受控实验。这项工作的更广泛影响最终是使软件团队能够在无冲突的环境中开发软件，并就与协作能力相关的关键流程培训学生。

Software development is a complex socio-technical activity typically occurring concurrently, in distributed teams, and within the larger organizational goals and context. Current development tools are overwhelmed by the scale of software-intensive systems, and often end up contributing to, rather than minimizing, information overload, and coordination breakdowns, which ultimately lead to software conflicts and project delays. This research seeks to establish an understanding of how past development data and team practices can be used to proactively identify dependencies and constraints across tasks, and schedule tasks so as to minimize conflicting changes in parallel, distributed development. This work will contribute: (1) conflict typology formalizing software conflicts and their interplay with organizational context, (2) knowledge about how to achieve improvements in productivity, quality, and development speed, (3) a suite of analysis techniques, design principles, tool prototypes, and interaction methods for conflict minimization in distributed, parallel development. Evaluation includes deployment to real software development teams and controlled experiments of the efficacy of the resulting tools. The broader impacts of the work are ultimately to enable software teams to develop software in a conflict-free environment and train students on critical processes associated with collaboration competency.