Software development is typically a collaborative activity. Development in large projects often involves branches, where changes are performed in parallel and merged periodically. While, there is no consensus on who should perform the merge, team members typically try to find someone with enough knowledge about the changes in the branches. This task can be difficult in cases where many different developers have made significant changes. My research proposes an approach, TIPMerge, to help select the most appropriate developers to participate in a collaborative merge session, such that we maximize the knowledge spread across changes. The goal of this research is to select a specified number of developers with the highest joint coverage. We use an optimization algorithm to find which developers form the best team together to deal with a specific merge case. We have implemented all the steps of our approach and evaluate parts of them.

Parallel development in branches is a common software practice. However, past work has found that integration of changes across branches is not easy, and often leads to failures. Thus far, there has been little work to recommend developers who have the right expertise to perform a branch integration. We propose TIPMerge, a novel tool that recommends developers who are best suited to perform merges, by taking into consideration developers’ past experience in the project, their changes in the branches, and de-pendencies among modified files in the branches. We evaluated TIPMerge on 28 projects, which included up to 15,584 merges with at least two developers, and potentially conflicting changes. On average, 85% of the top-3 recommendations by TIPMerge correctly included the developer who performed the merge. Best (accuracy) results of recommendations were at 98%. Our inter-views with developers of two projects reveal that in cases where the TIPMerge recommendation did not match the actual merge developer, the recommended developer had the expertise to per-form the merge, or was involved in a collaborative merge session.

Development in large projects often involves branches, where changes are performed in parallel and merged periodically. This merge process often combines two independent and long sequences of commits that may have been performed by multiple, different developers. It is nontrivial to identify the right developer to perform the merge, as the developer must have enough understanding of changes in both branches to ensure that the merged changes comply with the objective of both lines of work (branches), which may have been active for several months. We designed and developed TIPMerge, a novel tool that recommends developers who are best suited to perform the merge between two given branches. TIPMerge does so by taking into consideration developers’ past experience in the project, their changes in the branches, and the dependencies among modified files in the branches. In this paper we demonstrate TIPMerge over a real merge case from the Voldemort project.

Background: Along the last decade, there has been a significant increase in the adoption of the approaches based on Distributed Software Development (DSD). This approach has brought several competitive advantages, as well as new challenges such as communication and information sharing. In this context, the ontologies can provide benefits such as the definition, standardization and sharing of knowledge involved in the project, allowing a uniform understanding of information and facilitating the collaboration among distributed software development teams. Aim: Identifying evidence to determine which tools, models, techniques and best practices that use ontologies to support the DSD projects, and which ontologies proposed in this context. Method: This paper presents a systematic mapping study conducted in order to investigate how ontologies are being applied as a support to the DSD. The research protocol was based on Kitchenham's, and Travassos and Biolchini's guidelines. Searches were performed both in manual and automatic way in a set of digital libraries engines and leading conferences in the Software Engineering field. Results: From the initial set of 1588 studies, it was selected a total of 38 primary studies that answer the two research questions. Conclusions: This work presents evidences from each paper collected and an analysis of results reached. The results support the foundation for proposing and developing a feature based on ontologies to support the DSD, besides encouraging further researches that may promote advancements in this area and fostering the adoption of these types of resources by the global software industry.

Along the last decade, many companies started using Distributed Software Development (DSD). The distribution of the software development teams over the globe has become almost a rule in large companies. However, in this context, new problems arise, which mainly involve the physical and temporal distance among the participants. Some studies show that deploying a version control system to alleviate this problem is a big challenge for distributed teams. This paper presents a systematic mapping study about works about version control that focus on DSD. We found 29 studies related to DSD version control, published between 2002 and 2012. Using the systematically extracted data from these works, we present challenges, tools, and other solutions proposed to version control in DSD. These results can support practitioners and researchers to better understand and overcome the challenges related do DSD version control, and devise more effective solutions to improve version control in a distributed setting.

ABSTRACT Distributed software development (DSD) has intensified over the past few years, and DSD project management is more complex than collocated project management. However, no systematic research effort has focused on aggregating evidence from the scientific literature to build models to support project management on DSD context. For these reasons, the goal of this paper is to build an evidence‐based model of DSD project management from the research findings about challenges of DSD and the practices, models and tools proposed and used to overcome these challenges. We based the construction of this model on the evidence collected and synthesized by a comprehensive systematic mapping study of 70 research papers published between 1997 and 2009. We believe that our results can help practitioners and researchers to better understand the challenges and implement more effective solutions to improve project management within distributed project management teams. These results also provide a mapping of the research about DSD project management, identifying areas where further research is needed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper presents a systematic literature review of the challenges, best practices, models, and tools in Distributed Software Development (DSD) Project Management. The objective is to collect and systematize reported knowledge in terms of what are the difficulties in managing DSD projects, what are the best practices to overcome these difficulties, and how existing models and tools support these practices. We found 54 works related to DSD project management, published between 1998 and 2009. Using the data systematically extracted from these works, we propose an evidence-based DSD project management improvement model. Our contention is that this model can support practitioners and researchers to better understand the landscape of DSD project challenges and devise more effective solutions to improve project management in a distributed setting.