Lighthouse - A Coordination Platform Based on Emerging Design Tiago Proenca, Francisco Servant and Nilmax Moura Advisor: André van der Hoek Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences University of California, Irvine

Abstract

Despite the fact that software development is an inherently collaborative activity, a great deal of software development is spent with developers in isolation, working on their own parts of the system. In these situations developers are unaware of parallel changes being made by others, often resulting in conflicts. One approach to deal with this issue is called conflict resolution, which means that changes have been checked-in and developers must use tools to resolve conflicts and retest the code to ensure its correctness. Unfortunately, this process becomes more difficult the longer the conflicts go undetected. To address these issues, we are proposing a conflict avoidance approach that helps to find conflicts as soon as they occur. Lighthouse is an Eclipse plug-in that brings this approach to developers by utilizing a concept called emerging design, an up to date design representation of the code, alerting developers of potentially conflicting implementation changes as they occur.

 

Bio

Tiago Proenca is a Ph.D. Student in Software Engineering at University of California, Irvine. He holds a M.S. degree in Parallel and Distributed Computing and currently is working under the supervision of Professor André van der Hoek. Previously Tiago has worked in research projects involving medical image processing and communication (Epeople Solutions), wireless mesh networks (FUNCAMP), P2P video distribution (UFF) and model based testing (Siemens Corporate Research). His research interests include the areas of software design and architecture, coordination and software visualization.

Francisco Servant is a Masters student in Software Engineering at the Department of Informatics of the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at University of California, Irvine. He is working under the supervision of Professor André van der Hoek and holds a B.Sc. degree in Computer Science from the University of Granada, Spain. His research interests include the areas of Configuration Management, Software Engineering, and CSCW.

Nilmax Moura is a Ph.D. Student in Information and Computer Science at the Department of Informatics at University of California - Irvine, and he also has a Masters Degree in Computer Networking. Currently he is doing research in coordination, design, software visualization and SCM in André van der Hoek research group. Previously Nilmax has worked at Siemens Corporate Research in the Software Engineering Department, where he had the opportunity to be engaged in two research projects: Testing and Global Software Development.