Collaborative Real Time Coding or How to Avoid the Dreaded Merge

Abstract

Software engineers who collaborate to develop software in teams often have to manually merge changes they made to a module (e.g. a class), because the change conflicts with one that has just been made by another engineer to the same or another module (e.g. a supplier class). This is due to the fact that engineers edit code separately, and loosely coordinate their work via a source control or a software configuration management system (SCM). This work proposes to eliminate almost all the need to manually merge a recent change, by proposing a Collaborative Real Time Coding approach. In this approach, valid changes to the code are seen by others in real time, but intermediate changes (that cause the code not to compile) result in blocking other engineers from making changes related to the entity (e.g. method) being modified, while allowing them to work on most of the system. The subject of collaborative real time editing systems has been studied for the past 20 years. Research in this field has mostly concentrated on collaborative textual and graphical editing. In this work we address the challenges involved in designing a collaborative real time coding system, as well as present the major differences when compared to collaborative editing of plain text. We then present a prototype plug in for the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that allows for a collaborative coding to take place.