Collaborative-Design Conflicts: Costs and Solutions

Abstract

Collaborative design exposes software architects to the risk of making conflicting modeling changes that either can’t be merged or, when merged, violate consistency rules, nonfunctional requirements, or other system constraints. Such design conflicts are common and incur a high cost, including having to redo and abandon work. Proactive conflict detection can alleviate this risk. This article motivates the need for design conflict detection, describes the benefits of such detection to practitioners, and identifies requirements for building detection tools. In particular, FLAME is a collaborative-design framework that efficiently and continuously detects design conflicts. This article is part of a theme issue on collaborative modeling.