Merge conflicts cause software defects which if detected late may require expensive resolution. This is especially true when developers work too long without integrating concurrent changes, which in practice is common as integration generally occurs at check-in. Awareness of others' activities was proposed to help developers detect conflicts earlier. However, it requires developers to detect conflicts by themselves and may overload them with notifications, thus making detection harder. This paper presents a novel solution that continuously merges uncommitted and committed changes to create a background system that is analyzed, compiled, and tested to precisely and accurately detect conflicts on behalf of developers, before check-in. An empirical study confirms that our solution avoids overloading developers and improves early detection of conflicts over existing approaches. Similarly to what happened with continuous compilation, this introduces the case for continuous merging inside the IDE.

In publish-subscribe systems, multicast is an efficient way to propagate information from the publishers to a group of subscribers. This paper studies the problem of mapping a large set of subscriptions into a fixed, smaller set of multicast groups in order to support efficiently the dissemination of events. Given the large search space, it is infeasible to obtain the optimal solution in reasonable time. To address this difficulty, the paper proposes and evaluates a genetic search solution for the mapping problem.

This paper presents a new fault-tolerant clock synchronization algorithm designed for the Controller Area Network (CAN). The algorithm provides all correct processes of the system with a global timebase, despite the occurrence of faults in the network or in a minority of processes. Such global time-frame is a requirement of many distributed real-time control systems. Designing protocols for CAN is justified by the increasing use of this network in industrial automation applications. CAN owns a number of unique properties that can be used to improve the precision and performance of a clock synchronization algorithm. Unfortunately, some of its features also make the implementation of a fault-tolerant clock synchronization service a non-trivial task. Our algorithm addresses both the positive and the negative aspects of CAN.