Improving software team collaboration with Synchronized Software Development

Abstract

Effective collaboration is a key factor in the success of a software project developed by a team. In this work, we suggest the approach of Synchronized Software Development (SSD), which promotes a new mechanism of collaboration in general, and for code synchronization in particular. In SSD, code changes made by one developer are automatically propagated to others as long as they keep the code free of compilation errors. Changes that introduce compilation errors are not propagated until the errors are fixed. Moreover, other developers are restricted from concurrently editing the entities involved in these changes. While in this state, developers are, however, free to modify the rest of the entities. The novelty of our approach is that it actively synchronizes developers with the latest error free version of the source code, preventing possible conflicts and merges that may arise due to concurrent changes made by fellow team members. SSD also allows for a more transparent an practically near real time awareness of new code that is being introduced by multiple developers. We built CSI (Code Synchronizing Intelligence), a prototype demonstrating key features of SSD.