An empirical evaluation of an advanced version control tool in conflict detection and resolution

Abstract

ABSTRACTDistributed Software Development (DSD) is drawing a lot of attention from the research community due to its increasing significance. However, distance becomes a barrier in communication and coordination in such kind of development. Many tools have been used to help coordination in DSD. One such tool is Software Configuration Management (SCM) which has become an integral part of DSD. Although it coordinates the developers’ effort, it has the limitation of not detecting conflicts at an early stage. Therefore, the Advance Version Control (AVC) tool has been designed and implemented to enhance the functionality of the version control system in a distributed environment. It performs versioning of files as well as detects the conflicts at an early stage and informs the concerned developers about conflicting changes. It provides code sharing to mutually resolve the inconsistencies. It also provides a communication medium because, sometimes, communication between conflicting developers can also solve the problem.This paper presents the results from an empirical evaluation of tool AVC. To measure the effectiveness of the tool, a metric suite is designed. Also, two experiments have been performed among the developers to check the efficiency of the tool. This work has been carried out as an extension of the work done in the paper [Kaur I, Singh H. Advanced Version Control (AVC): a paradigm shift from version control to conflict management. IJCA. June 2017;167(10):7–15].