ConE: A Concurrent Edit Detection Tool for Large Scale Software Development
Modern, complex software systems are being continuously extended and adjusted. The developers responsible for this may come from different teams or organizations, and may be distributed over the world. This may make it difficult to keep track of what other developers are doing, which may result in multiple developers concurrently editing the same code areas. This, in turn, may lead to hard-to-merge changes or even merge conflicts, logical bugs that are difficult to detect, duplication of work, and wasted developer productivity. To address this, we explore the extent of this problem in the pull request based software development model. We study half a year of changes made to six large repositories in Microsoft in which at least 1,000 pull requests are created each month. We find that files concurrently edited in different pull requests are more likely to introduce bugs. Motivated by these findings, we design, implement, and deploy a service named ConE (Concurrent Edit Detector) that proactively detects pull requests containing concurrent edits, to help mitigate the problems caused by them. ConE has been designed to scale, and to minimize false alarms while still flagging relevant concurrently edited files. Key concepts of ConE include the detection of the Extent of Overlap between pull requests, and the identification of Rarely Concurrently Edited Files. To evaluate ConE, we report on its operational deployment on 234 repositories inside Microsoft. ConE assessed 26,000 pull requests and made 775 recommendations about conflicting changes, which were rated as useful in over 70% (554) of the cases. From interviews with 48 users we learned that they believed ConE would save time in conflict resolution and avoiding duplicate work, and that over 90% intend to keep using the service on a daily basis.
Mon 14 NovDisplayed time zone: Beijing, Chongqing, Hong Kong, Urumqi change
11:00 - 12:30 | |||
11:00 15mTalk | Pull Request Latency Explained: An Empirical Overview Journal First Xunhui Zhang National University of Defense Technology, China, Yue Yu College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China, Tao Wang National University of Defense Technology, Ayushi Rastogi University of Groningen, The Netherlands, Huaimin Wang National University of Defense Technology Link to publication DOI Pre-print | ||
11:15 15mTalk | Engineering Impacts of Anonymous Author Code Review: A Field Experiment Journal First Emerson Murphy-Hill Google, Jillian Dicker Google, Margaret Morrow Hodges Google, Carolyn Egelman Google, Ciera Jaspan Google, Lan Cheng Google, Liz Kammer Google, Ben Holtz Google, Matthew Jorde Google, Inc., Andrea Knight Google, Collin Green Google | ||
11:30 15mTalk | An Actionable Framework for Understanding and Improving Developer Experience Journal First Michaela Greiler University of Zurich, Switzerland, Margaret-Anne Storey University of Victoria, Abi Noda DX, USA | ||
11:45 15mTalk | The Influence of Human Aspects on Requirements Engineering-related Activities: Software practitioners’ Perspective Journal First Dulaji Hidellaarachchi Monash University, John Grundy Monash University, Rashina Hoda Monash University, ingo Mueller Monash University | ||
12:00 15mTalk | How are project-specific forums utilized? A study of participation, content, and sentiment in the Eclipse ecosystem Journal First Yusuf Sulistyo Nugroho Universitas Muhammadiyah Surakarta, Syful Islam Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Keitaro Nakasai National Institute of Technology, Kagoshima College, Ifraz Rehman Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Hideaki Hata Shinshu University, Raula Gaikovina Kula Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Mei Nagappan University of Waterloo, Kenichi Matsumoto Nara Institute of Science and Technology Link to publication DOI Pre-print Media Attached | ||
12:15 15mTalk | ConE: A Concurrent Edit Detection Tool for Large Scale Software Development Journal First Chandra Sekhar Maddila Microsoft Research, Nachiappan Nagappan Facebook, Christian Bird Microsoft Research, Georgios Gousios Endor Labs & Delft University of Technology, Arie van Deursen Delft University of Technology DOI Pre-print |