CAREER: Conflict Minimization in Distributed Software Development

软件开发是一项复杂的社会技术活动，通常在分布式团队中并发发生，并且在更大的组织目标和环境中发生。当前的开发工具被软件密集型系统的规模所淹没，并且经常最终导致信息过载，而不是最小化协调故障，这最终导致软件冲突和项目延迟。本研究试图建立对过去的开发数据和团队实践如何用于主动识别任务之间的依赖关系和约束的理解，并安排任务，以便在并行的分布式开发中最小化冲突变更。这项工作将有助于：(1)冲突类型形式化软件冲突及其与组织环境的相互作用，(2)关于如何实现生产力、质量和开发速度的改进的知识，(3)一套分析技术、设计原则、工具原型，以及在分布式、并行开发中最小化冲突的交互方法。评估包括对实际软件开发团队的部署，以及对结果工具有效性的控制实验。这项工作的更广泛的影响最终是使软件团队能够在一个没有冲突的环境中开发软件，并训练学生掌握与协作能力相关的关键过程。

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.