Merging graph - like object structures Albert

1 INTRODUCTION This paper addresses the problem of coordinating a team of software developers concurrently working on a common software system. The standard approach to coordinate concurrent activities on a common set of data is locking. Any part of data used by one person is locked against concurrent use by another person. The second person has to wait until the first person has finished his or her task and releases the lock. In databases, sophisticated locking and transaction concepts minimize the waiting times for concurrent users by offering different lock granularities and different locking levels (e.g. multiple read locks vs. single write locks). However, these locking strategies assume that locks are hold for relatively short times (some seconds), only.