CONFER: Towards Groupware for Building Consensus in Collaborative Software Engineering

Distributed computing technology allows software engineering teams to work across different locations and times, collaboratively refining documents or diagrams ultimately producing a single agreed outcome. A natural part of this process is the emergence of differences or conflicts reflecting divergent team member perspectives, interpretations, skills or knowledge. This paper describes CONFER (CONflict Free Editing in a Replicated architecture) a system that address the handling of conflicts in collaborative software development projects. At the technical level, CONFER detects and stores conflicts until they are resolved by user actions. However, it is in the social domain that these user actions are formed and resolved, so effective collaboration tools will need to include support for conflict resolution in the social domain as well. Some software engineering teams will be based on models of cooperation and maintenance of team harmony may require that conflict resolution be based on discussion and consensus, rather than by authority or by simple voting systems. A consensus building approach is proposed based on a method used in travel planning (ChuCaroll, 2000) that encourages participants to further explore alternatives together with their own proposals. The social support mechanism has been simulated using paper and pen and assessed in a small experiment. The evaluation suggests that the technique is easy to use, reduces conflict resolution time and may be a useful extension to CONFER.