June 8, 2004
McDonnell Douglas Auditorium, University of California, Irvine

Palantír - Distributed Awareness in Configuration Management

Poster and Demonstration

Students: Anita Sarma, Ryan Y.Yasui, Roger Ripley, Ksatria Williams

Advisor: André van der Hoek

Abstract: Current configuration management systems isolate workspaces such that work in one workspace is shielded from parallel changes in other workspaces. This workspace isolation is needed so that changes in one workspace do not interfere with changes by another developer working in parallel. This isolation, however, creates a problem in that developers are not aware of other work-space activities. As a result, developers often end up making conflicting changes that on promotion to a central configuration man-agement repository have to be resolved - a time consuming task. To address this problem we are building Palantír, a novel work-space awareness tool. Palantír raises awareness among developers by providing them with continuous information about concurrent changes and how these changes would affect their work. Palantír thus moves the point at which conflicts are detected earlier, from being only at the moment at which changes are committed to continuously during the making of changes. This allows early detection of potential conflicts and should result in fewer and smaller conflicts.

Bio: Anita Sarma is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the school of Information and Computer Science at UC Irvine, specializing in software engineering. Her research interests lie in configuration management and awareness, namely, how to coordinate distributed CM workspaces, such that the users are shielded from other developers changes, but aware of those changes. She has published papers in the International Conference on Software Engineering and the International Computer Software and Application Conference, among others.

Bio: Ryan Yasui is a Ph.D. student in the Informatics Dept. in the School of Information and Computer Science. His research interests are in configuration management; he is a member of the Palantír reserach group.

Bio: Roger Ripley is a second-year M.S. student in the school of Information and Computer Science at UC Irvine, specializing in software engineering. He received a B.S. in Information in Computer Science from UC Irvine with specializations in both Networks and Distributed Systems and Information Systems in 2001. His research interests include configuration management, distributed awareness, and architectures that support the dynamism of those environments.

Bio: Ksatria Williams is an undergraduate student in the school of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. His current research involves increasing awareness in configuration management as part of the Palantír group. In the future he hopes to perform research in computer graphics and enter the movie special effects industry.