VC2-providing awareness in off-the-shelf version control systems

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 con ict resolution. 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 offthe-shelf version control systems and monitors filesystem accesses to relevant files in order to enhance the awareness among developers. With VC2 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.