Awareness and Merge Conflicts in Distributed Software Development

Abstract

Collaborative software development requires programmers to coordinate their work and merge individual contributions into a consistent shared code base. Traditionally, coordination follows a series of update-modify-commit" cycles, where merge conflicts arise upon committing if individual modifications have diverged and must be explicitly reconciled. Researchers have been suggesting that providing timely awareness information about "who's changing what" may not only help deal with conflicts but, more generally, improve the effectiveness of collaboration. This paper investigates the impact of awareness information in the context of globally distributed software development. Based on an analysis of data from 105 student developers constituting 12 development teams located in different countries, we analyze, among other things: 1) the frequency of merge conflicts and insufficient awareness, 2) the impact of distribution on team awareness, 3) the perceived impact of conflicts and lack of awareness on productivity, motivation, and project punctuality. Our findings include: 1) lack of awareness occurs more frequently than merge conflicts, 2) information about remote team members is missing roughly as often as information about colocated ones, 3) insufficient awareness information affects more negatively programmer's performance than merge conflicts.