Vector-Field Consistency for Collaborative Software Development

Software development is, mostly, a collaborative process where teams of developers work together in order to produce quality code. Collaboration is, generally, not an issue, as teams work together in the same office or building. However, larger projects may require more people, who might be spread through-out different floors, buildings and different companies. Several systems have been developed in order to provide better means of communication and awareness over the actions of others. Still, most of them rely on an all-or-nothing approach: where the user is either immediately notified of all modifications occurring in a shared project, or is completely oblivious to all external changes. We propose a new solution based on the adaptation of the Vector-Field Consistency algorithm which relies on two distinct concepts: locality-awareness and continuous consistency model. Where the former represents the ability of system to make choices based on the proximity of remote changes in relation to a particular user’s position. While the later corresponds to a consistency model between strong and weak consistency, which is able to control and impose a limit over how much two replicas can diverge. With the correct parametrization this model can establish a great balance between consistency and availability. In this work we explain how the VFC algorithm, originally planned for distributed ad-hoc gaming, was adapted into the context collaborative software development; thus allowing programmers to have a higher degree of awareness over remote changes which might directly affect their work, and as the impact of changes decreases, so will the level awareness. And later we describe in detail how our architecture was applied to the Eclipse IDE, under the form of a plug-in, to provide a new level of distributed collaboration to software developers, and how it was evaluated.