SHF: Small: Analytical Support for Investigating Software Modifications in Collaborative Development Environment

协作对软件开发至关重要。当软件工程师开发和改进软件时，他们需要分析其他开发人员在各种任务中实现的过去和现在的软件修改，例如同级代码审查、错误调查和更改影响分析。开发人员经常被大量关于软件修改的意识信息所淹没。自动生成的关于签入、构建和回归测试的电子邮件经常淹没开发人员的邮箱，但是开发人员很难识别重要的和相关的更改事件。现有的软件工程工具不容易允许开发人员搜索与他们的任务、关注点和兴趣相关的软件修改。这个研究项目将为在称为CHIME的协作开发环境中调查软件修改提供分析支持。首先，CHIME将提供一个可扩展的、逻辑的变更分析框架，根据各种增量关系来识别与自己的代码修改相关的软件修改。框架的用户可以导入、选择和扩展各个软件修改之间的干扰、依赖、相似和共现关系的各种概念。其次，CHIME将提供一个搜索界面，使用户能够询问和回答有关内容、结构和代码修改上下文的问题。为了减轻程序员制定搜索查询的负担，我们将与专业开发人员进行实证研究，以确定有关过去和现在软件修改的常见问题。问题的结果列表将作为模板查询提供，开发人员可以使用或改进。第三，CHIME将通过监控其他开发人员与自己的修改相关的变更事件，有针对性地通知其他人的软件修改。这项研究的影响将大大提高开发人员在快速发展、协作和并行软件开发中的生产力。CHIME将减少意识信息过载，并将帮助用户管理他人代码更改对其代码的影响，早期检测和解决合并冲突，协调共享任务，有助于早期检测和消除集成和干扰故障。

Collaboration is essential to software development. As software engineers develop and evolve software, they need to analyze past and present software modifications implemented by other developers in various tasks such as peer code reviews, bug investigations, and change impact analysis. Developers are often overwhelmed with a large amount of awareness information about software modifications. Auto-generated emails about check-ins, builds, and regression tests often flood developers' mail boxes, yet it is very difficult for developers to identify significant and relevant change-events. Existing software engineering tools do not easily allow developers to search software modifications relevant to their tasks, focus, and interests.This research project will produce analytical support for investigating software modifications in collaborative development environment called CHIME. First, CHIME will provide an extensible, logical change analysis framework that identifies software modifications relevant to one's own code modification according to various kinds of delta relationships. The users of the framework can import, select, and extend various notions of interference, dependence, similarity, and co-occurrence relationships among individual software modifications. Second, CHIME will provide a search interface to empower users to ask and answer questions about the content, structure, and context of code changes across multiple revisions. In order to reduce programmers' burden on formulating search queries, we will conduct empirical studies with professional developers to identify frequently asked questions about past and present software modifications. The resulting list of the questions will be provided as template queries that the developers can use or refine. Third, CHIME will provide targeted notifications about others' software modifications by monitoring other developers' change-events that are relevant to the developer's own modification. The impact of this research will be substantially improved developer productivity in a rapidly-evolving, collaborative and parallel software development. CHIME will reduce awareness information overload and will help users manage the impact of others' code changes on their code, detect and resolve merge conflicts early, and coordinate shared tasks, contributing toward early detection and removal of integration and interference failures.